A non goal is a statement of what a strategy has decided against doing in a named period, set down beside what it has decided to do. Ravi Mehta brought the term into product management. He described the practice in First Round Review on 8 March 2022, alongside the product strategy stack he wrote with Zainab Ghadiyali. The first hard request arrives within weeks of a strategy being funded, and it arrives at a product manager's desk. An exclusion that exists only in somebody's memory loses that meeting.
The sections below define a non goal and separate it from a backlog item. The next section explains why an unwritten exclusion gets reversed. Refusing a good idea comes after that, because a good idea is the only hard refusal. The page ends with the written form a non goal takes, where non goals live and when they lapse.
What a non goal is
A non goal names something the organisation could plausibly do, states that it has chosen against doing it this period and gives the reason. Three properties separate a non goal from an item nobody has reached yet.
- It is a decision, so it has an author and a date.
- It is bounded, so it applies to a stated period and lapses at the end of that period.
- It is specific enough to check, so anybody can tell whether the organisation has honoured it.
An item at position four hundred in a backlog carries none of the three. Nobody chose against it, nothing bounds it and nobody can be shown to have broken it. A request arriving with a senior sponsor behind it moves a backlog item up the list in an afternoon. The same request has to argue with a non goal in public, in front of the people who agreed it.
Mehta's reason for writing non goals down is simple. A strategy discussion ends with everybody holding a slightly different version of what was agreed. Without the specificity, he told First Round Review, "everyone walks away with a different opinion of what the strategy is, through the lens of what they think is most important".
Two people can leave the same meeting believing they agreed. The part most likely to differ is the part nobody said aloud, and that part is the exclusion. A non goal is that exclusion, written down where both of them can read it.
Why an unwritten non goal gets reversed
An exclusion held in somebody's head has no author, no date and no stated reason, so reversing it costs nothing at all. The meeting where this happens has a recognisable shape. A senior person arrives with a request and the request is a reasonable one. Nobody in the room can produce the sentence explaining why the organisation chose against it. The work enters the plan on the strength of the most recent argument anybody made for it.
The cost runs well past the single request. A team that watched one exclusion fall over in one meeting reads every other exclusion as provisional. A strategy made of provisional exclusions is a list of current preferences with a cover page on it. The next request meets even less resistance, because the precedent is now in the room.
Writing a non goal down will not prevent the reversal. Writing it down changes what the reversal costs. Somebody has to name the non goal they are overturning, say what has changed since it was written and accept that the change goes on the record with their name against it. Most requests do not survive that, and the ones that do are usually right.
Saying no to a good idea
Refusal is only difficult when the idea is good. A weak idea loses the argument in the meeting where somebody raises it, so nobody needs a method for that case. Steve Jobs made the point at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997, saying that focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas there are. Richard Rumelt made the same argument in Good Strategy Bad Strategy in 2011, writing that good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests.
The reason a strategy gives for a refusal is never that the idea is poor. The reason is that the idea belongs to a different choice about where to compete or how to win, and the organisation already made that choice with evidence in front of it. Anybody refusing on the merits of the idea has to win an argument about the idea, which is an argument they will often lose, because the idea is good.
Three things make a refusal hold.
- The strategic choice the idea conflicts with, said out loud, so the disagreement moves to the choice where it belongs.
- What the organisation would give up to do it, counted in engineers and in months.
- The evidence that would change the answer. A refusal with no reopening condition leaves the person who asked with nothing to test, so it comes back later as a complaint.
A refusal carrying all three is a piece of the strategy restated in front of the person who asked. A refusal carrying none of them is somebody with more authority saying no, and the person who heard it will raise the idea again as soon as the authority in the room changes.
The form a written non goal takes
The same three parts belong in the written form as much as in the spoken refusal. A non goal written as a bare title carries almost nothing. The usable form names three things, which are the exclusion, the reason drawn from the strategy and the condition that would reopen it.
| The non goal | Why the strategy excludes it | What would reopen it |
|---|---|---|
| No enterprise single sign on this year | The chosen segment is teams under fifty people, who buy without a procurement review | A fifth of new revenue arriving from companies above five hundred seats |
| No native mobile application before June | The measured work happens at a desk, and mobile splits a team of nine across two codebases | Session data showing a quarter of active use on a phone |
| No reselling through partners in 2026 | Distribution is product led, and a partner channel needs a margin the current price cannot carry | A price rise holding for two quarters without extra churn |
The reopening condition does most of the work in every row. A non goal with a stated condition turns a recurring argument into a measurement. The disagreement then has somewhere to go other than the next planning meeting. The reason column does the rest of the work, since a reason drawn from the strategy is one anybody can check against the strategy.
Where non goals live and when they lapse
A non goal belongs on the same page as the strategy it protects. An exclusion filed somewhere separate is an exclusion nobody reads. A new joiner can take in a single page carrying the diagnosis, the choices and the non goals in about five minutes.
Lapsing is the other half of the arrangement. A non goal applies to a stated period, and the review that sets the next period's strategy reopens every one of them deliberately, one at a time. An organisation that has never reopened a non goal has stopped noticing that markets move. An organisation that reopens them continuously never had any.
A non goal survives its second meeting only if somebody can say what the excluded work would have consumed and what the funded work returns. Focus stated as a preference is an opinion, and two people can hold it differently. Focus stated as an amount of engineering time set against an amount of revenue is an argument with a right answer. Reaching that answer runs on unit economics.