Setting Engineering Goals for 2026 (Without Setting Your Team Up to Fail)

Written by Adam Horner, CTO Coach, The CTO Playbook

A while back, I started working with an organisation where something felt off almost immediately.

On the surface, things looked reasonable enough. There were business goals, engineering plans, delivery timelines, and a team that clearly cared about doing good work. But as I spent time with the engineers, and then with the wider leadership team, it became apparent that everyone was working hard in directions that didn’t quite line up.

Engineering was being measured against expectations they hadn’t been involved in shaping. The business was frustrated that delivery never quite matched what it thought it had asked for. Conversations felt tense in a low-level way, without anyone being able to point at a single cause.

Over time, it became harder to ignore the pattern. The team wasn’t underperforming. They were misaligned.

And once things reach that point, effort alone doesn’t really help. The system makes success unlikely, regardless of intent. The team, without anyone explicitly deciding it, had been set up to fail.

That experience tends to come back to me whenever the conversation turns to goal setting, particularly as CTOs start looking ahead to the next planning cycle.

Where misalignment quietly shows up

Most organisations don’t lack goals. What they often lack is shared meaning.

I’ve seen engineering teams working flat out on objectives that made complete sense within their own context, while the rest of the business assumed those same objectives would deliver very different outcomes. Nobody involved thought they were acting unreasonably. They were just filling in the blanks differently.

This is where goals quietly do a lot of work. They carry assumptions about priorities, trade-offs, and what “good” looks like, even when those assumptions aren’t written down anywhere.

When that translation between the business and engineering is fuzzy, the impact doesn’t show up straight away. It appears later as missed expectations, frustration, and a growing sense that people are talking past each other without realising it.

Starting with the business, even when it feels obvious

For many CTOs, this part can feel almost too basic to mention, and yet it’s often where things begin to drift.

A strong engineering goal usually has a clear connection to what the business is trying to achieve over the next couple of years, not just the next quarter. Growth, margin, resilience, risk reduction, customer trust. Whatever matters most at that stage of the company needs to be visible in the goals engineering is working towards.

When that connection is weak or implicit, teams still optimise. They always do. They improve quality, reduce friction, and solve the problems they can see in front of them.

None of that is wasted effort. But without a clear line back to the business, it can still miss what the organisation actually needs most.

How goals come into existence matters more than we think

One pattern I keep noticing is that goals often arrive through momentum rather than intent.

Last year’s goals roll forward with minor edits. A few new ones get layered on. The language changes, but the underlying assumptions stay largely untouched and unquestioned.

It feels efficient, especially when time is tight. But it also means very little space is created to ask whether those goals still reflect where the organisation is now, or where it realistically wants to be next.

Deliberate goal setting takes longer at the start. It requires slowing down enough to surface assumptions, name constraints, and be explicit about what will not be prioritised. That can feel uncomfortable, particularly when there’s pressure to move quickly.

The cost of skipping that work tends to show up later, once teams are busy but progress feels thinner than expected.

Stretch works differently once a goal is in motion

Another tension that shows up consistently is how goals behave once teams start working against them.

Goals that feel comfortably achievable tend to fade into the background. People know they’ll be met, so they rarely force hard decisions or meaningful trade-offs.

At the other end of the spectrum, goals that are clearly unrealistic often lose credibility quickly. Teams learn, usually without saying so out loud, that these targets are more symbolic than practical.

The goals that seem to have the most impact sit somewhere between those extremes. They create just enough pressure to force prioritisation, without tipping into disbelief. They’re hard enough to be taken seriously, but grounded enough to remain part of everyday decision-making.

Finding that balance isn’t formulaic. It relies on judgement, context, and a willingness to revisit assumptions as reality unfolds.

Shaping goals with the people who have to live with them

One of the more noticeable differences between teams that sustain momentum and those that struggle is how goals are shaped in the first place.

When objectives are handed down fully formed, teams may comply, but ownership tends to be thin. Constraints remain hidden. Risks surface late. People work around problems quietly rather than raising them early.

When teams are involved in shaping goals, even if leadership retains the final say, the dynamic changes. Assumptions get tested sooner. Trade-offs become visible. Engineers start thinking in terms of outcomes rather than tasks.

Those conversations are rarely tidy, and they do take longer. Over the course of a year, though, they often save far more time than they consume.

Process and culture are always part of the picture

Goals don’t operate in a vacuum.

Process determines how easily decisions move, where work gets stuck, and how much friction exists day to day. Culture shapes what people feel safe saying, what gets challenged, and what quietly goes unmentioned.

I’ve seen sensible goals struggle in environments where decision-making was slow or ownership unclear, and modestly challenging goals succeed in teams where communication was open and constraints were discussed early.

Accounting for process and culture doesn’t mean lowering ambition. It means understanding the terrain you’re asking people to navigate.

Treating goals as something you return to

Annual goal setting still has value, but it rarely survives unchanged for twelve months.

The teams that seem to handle this best treat goals as living artefacts. They revisit them regularly, often quarterly, and are willing to adjust when assumptions no longer hold or priorities genuinely shift.

Those reviews also make accountability feel more grounded. Progress is discussed in context, rather than judged retrospectively, and performance conversations have something concrete to attach to.

In some organisations, this connects neatly into performance reviews. In others, it runs alongside them. The structure matters less than the consistency and intent behind it.

Looking ahead to 2026

As CTOs start thinking about 2026, there’s often a pull towards ambition. Bigger goals. Broader scope. More impact.

What I find myself listening for instead is coherence. How clearly do the goals reflect how the organisation actually operates? How explicitly do they acknowledge constraints rather than gloss over them? Can engineering see how its work connects to the outcomes the business cares most about?

Those signals tend to say more about the year ahead than the goals themselves.

I’m still struck by how often teams struggle, not through lack of capability or commitment, but because the system around them quietly works against them. When that happens, goals become a source of pressure rather than progress.

These days, when I hear leaders talk about plans for the year ahead, I pay close attention to what’s missing from the conversation.

That’s often where the real work begins.