Every Failed Goal I’ve Seen Had the Same 3 Problems on Day One.

Every failed OKR or goal that I’ve seen across every company I’ve worked with has the same pattern. Same three problems. Every single time.

And these aren’t problems that show up at the end of the quarter. They’re visible on Day One. If anyone bothered to check. Nobody does.

Here are the 3 questions you should ask before setting any goal. Most companies skip all 3.

Then they act surprised when the goal fails 12 weeks later.

01	BANDWIDTH	Does the team have capacity?	If your team is already at 100%, a new goal doesn’t get added. Something else gets dropped.
02	DEPENDENCIES	Who else is involved and do they know?	If the goal depends on another team that has no matching OKR, the goal is already at risk.
03	WEEK 3 CHECK	What does failure look like early?	If you can’t describe what week 3 success looks like, you don’t have a goal. You have a wish.

Question 1: Does the Team Actually Have the Bandwidth to Do This?

One of my clients owned a large e-commerce company. He set a quarterly goal: reach $100K per month for one of his private label Amazon stores.

Sounds great.

Here’s what he didn’t consider:

• The team was only 10 people

• The same 10 people were also running a second store

• They were cross-dependent on a creative team for product images

• Nobody calculated how many hours per week this goal actually required

Running a private label Amazon store at $100K/month isn’t just “sell more.”

It means:

• Handling hundreds of customer enquiries daily

• Responding to bad reviews fast (or Amazon takes your store down)

• Managing inventory so you don’t go out of stock at peak

• Running and optimizing ad campaigns at serious scale

• All the day-to-day operations that already eat 8 hours a day

The founder woke up, decided he wanted $100K, and typed it into his OKR tool. Goal set. Team notified. Everyone nodded in the meeting.

But nobody asked: can these 10 people, who are already running two stores, realistically add $100K in monthly revenue with their current capacity?

The answer was no. But the goal existed anyway.

• And here’s the sub-question nobody ever asks: is the team even motivated to hit this goal?

• Are they getting paid more if they hit $100K?

• Do they care?

• Is this the founder’s dream assigned to people who have no personal stake in it?

Question 2: Who Else Does This Depend On and Do They Know?

Let me tell you a story about my own mistake.

When we started building ShiftFocus, we set a goal: launch the MVP in 60 days. We thought it was realistic.

We purchased a frontend framework from ThemeForest to save money and time. The backend team would build the core, and the frontend was “already done.”

Here’s what we didn’t know:

• The ThemeForest framework had hidden dependencies across dozens of files

• Every small change broke something else

• The backend team couldn’t work independently, constantly blocked by frontend issues

• What should have been 60 days became 120 days

Who’s to blame? 100% me.

I was the one who decided to buy a cheap framework to save money. I made the backend team dependent on a pre-built frontend that wasn’t designed for our use case. That decision alone doubled our development timeline and cost us thousands of dollars.

We eventually scrapped the entire frontend and hired two dedicated frontend developers to rebuild from scratch. That’s the real cost of unplanned dependencies.

Another example from a client:

• A client wanted to increase organic traffic. They assigned it to the SEO and content team. Simple enough, right?

• But nobody thought about:

• The creative team that provides images and videos for blog content

• The social media team that distributes the content

• The product team that needs to provide technical information for product pages

The SEO team’s goal depended on 3 other teams. None of those teams had matching OKRs. None of them even knew they were a dependency.

So when organic traffic didn’t grow, the SEO team got blamed for a failure caused by bottlenecks they had zero control over.

Most enterprise clients set goals without ever checking the cross-dependency factor. It’s the most common and most expensive blind spot in goal setting.

Question 3: What Does Failure Look Like at Week 3 Not Week 12?

Back to the private label Amazon store.

The founder set a $100K/month goal for the quarter.

He already failed Question 1 (not enough bandwidth) and Question 2 (didn’t check cross-team dependencies).

But let’s say he had asked Question 3: what should the numbers look like by week 3 to know if we’re on track?

TIMELINE	TARGET	STATUS
WEEK 4	$30K-$40K	On track	✓
WEEK 8	$60K-$70K	Momentum building	✓
WEEK 12	$100K	Goal achieved	✓
REALITY	$10K total	Goal was dead on Day 1	❌

The store didn’t even reach $10,000 by week 12. Not $10K per month. $10K total. By the end of the entire quarter.

Why?

• They didn’t have enough inventory to sell at that scale

• They hadn’t planned ad spend to drive that level of traffic

• They had no roadmap for how $100K was supposed to happen week by week

• They set the goal because the software let them type it in, not because they had a plan

They went in blind. Not because they’re bad at business. Because they trusted the goal-setting software to be more than a form.

It’s not.

It’s just a place to type numbers. It doesn’t tell you the numbers are unrealistic. It doesn’t flag that you’re behind at week 3. It doesn’t show you what failure looks like before it’s too late.

Ask These 3 Questions Before Your Next Quarter. I Dare You.

Before you type a single OKR into any software:

1. Bandwidth

Does the team have the actual capacity to do this or are you stacking a goal on top of people who are already maxed out?

2. Dependencies

Who else does this depend on, and have you told them? If the answer is “I’m not sure,” the goal is already at risk.

3. Week 3 Checkpoint

What should success look like at week 3? If you can’t answer that, you don’t have a goal. You have a wish.

I built these 3 checks into ShiftFocus because I got tired of watching goals die from the same 3 causes. Workload metrics check bandwidth before you commit.

Dependency mapping shows who else is involved. AI-powered early warning flags failure at week 3 instead of week 12.

But you don’t need software to start. Ask these 3 questions before your next quarterly planning session. I guarantee at least one goal on your list fails all three.