Project Objectives vs. Success Criteria: Why You Need Both for Your Big Initiative
Strong objectives and measurable success criteria can turn big project ambitions into real results.
Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash
Without clear objectives, your team doesn’t know where it’s headed.
Without success criteria, you won’t know if you ever got there.
When you’re leading a major project, it’s easy to get caught up in the everyday activity — status meetings (and requirements meetings, design meetings, steerco meetings, touch base meetings — so many meetings), creating requirements, documenting the solution. But month of activity without a strong sense of direction (and without a way to measure success) can lead to a lot of wasted time and money.
Let’s talk about why you need both strong objectives and success criteria to lead your project toward meaningful outcomes.
What Are Project Objectives?
Project objectives set the destination. An objective defines what the project will deliver and why it matters for the business and your customers. It’s the high-level statement that gives the team a clear target to aim for.
Good objectives are:
Strategic and tied to real, big-picture business goals (think of your CEO’s top priorities)
Easy for everyone to understand, even stakeholders outside your core team (limit the use of jargon)
Specific about “what” and “why”
Grounded in customer and company value (clarifying why the project matters to both)
Clear about any critical constraints or guardrails on delivery
Here’s an example of a solid project objective:
Implement a gamified loyalty program with personalized rewards to strengthen customer engagement and increase repeat visits, while maintaining alignment with our brand’s interactive family experience focus. The program must include mechanisms to monitor customer understanding and prevent confusion about reward earning and redemption.
Without an objective like this, it’s impossible for your team to make the right tradeoffs when things get messy (and they will, with big projects like this — it’s completely normal). The objective keeps everyone’s eye on the prize.
What Are Success Criteria?
If objectives set the destination, success criteria tell you how you’ll know when you arrive. Success criteria are the specific, measurable outcomes that prove whether you achieved the objective.
Good success criteria are:
Tied directly to the objective (they’re not random or unrelated KPIs)
Clear, credible, and measurable (and you’ll have the data and a plan to measure it by the time the project is done)
Focused on real business outcomes, not just “did we launch it?” (launch time can be an important criteria, but it shouldn’t be the only one)
Achievable, but meaningful enough to stretch the team toward even better results
Here’s an example of a well-defined measure of success:
Achieve 30% loyalty program adoption within 9 months of launch.
This measure shifts the conversation from “Did we launch a loyalty program?” to “Did the loyalty program deliver the real customer engagement that we were trying to achieve?” Even more importantly, it helps define “customer engagement,” so the team knows what’s important to get right.
How They Work Together
Objectives and success criteria aren’t just two separate boxes to check. They’re two sides of the same coin, and the relationship matters:
Objectives steer the big picture.
Implement a gamified loyalty program with personalized rewards to strengthen customer engagement and increase repeat visits, while maintaining alignment with our brand’s interactive family experience focus.
Success criteria validate if you delivered the business value.
Achieve 30% loyalty program adoption within 9 months.
Drive 3+ loyalty interactions per user per month.
Maintain or improve NPS among loyalty members.
Putting objectives and success criteria down on paper might feel like you’re just ticking an administrative box. But when they’re strong and aligned, they give you something solid to come back to when the team faces tough tradeoff decisions. They help you prioritize smarter, move faster, and ultimately deliver real business outcomes.
For a deeper dive into writing high-quality success criteria — including common pitfalls and real-world examples — read the follow-up here.
Common Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Over the years, I’ve seen some common traps that trip up even seasoned teams:
Writing objectives that sound impressive but say nothing (“Become a world-class leader in innovation”). Focus on tangible deliverables and the specific business value they drive.
Measuring deliverables instead of outcomes (“Launch new platform” is not a success measure. Revenue growth, adoption, engagement are.). Always connect success measures to real-world business impact. Think about the operational KPIs that your teams monitor on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Overloading with 20+ success criteria (If everything’s a priority, nothing is.). Prioritize the 3–5 most critical measures that clearly prove success.
Skipping alignment with sponsors and leadership (The fastest way to derail a project is to assume everyone agrees.). Confirm and document buy-in early; review objectives and success criteria with sponsors and key leaders.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A few simple tweaks to how you define and align these early on can make all the difference.
Want to Make It Easier?
If you want ready-to-go templates, real-world examples, and a KPI library with over 100 success measures you can plug into your projects, check out the Project Objectives & Success Criteria PRO Bundle.
I built it based on the same tools I use with my own clients, so you can get clarity, alignment, and results — faster.
Setting a clear direction and measuring what matters isn’t extra work. It is the work. And when you get it right, everything else flows from there.
