# Project Goals Program Update - 2025H2

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give you an update on where we are with the project goals program. We ran a survey recently and we got good feedback. Overall, most folks were positive (13/16 respondents felt the program should continue) but there were a lot of specific points on how it could be better. We're planning some changes this round in response.

## TL;DR

Owing to "life", 2025H2 goals will run from September to December. The schedule is as follows:

* **Now until Jul 18:** Goal submission period -- please submit PRs!
* **July 21 to Aug 1:** Prioritization discussions with teams and team leads; flagship goal selection (we're doing this more bottom-up this time, see below).
* **Aug 5 to Aug 8:** Hold public reviews of the Draft RFC at designated times. Make final edits.
* **Aug 12 to Aug 31:** Relentlessly ping people until they check their boxes. Wait for FCP to finish. You know the drill.
* **Sep 1:** Goals begin!
* **Oct 15:** We start planning for 2026H1 so we can start on time. 😑

We'll be doing two things differently this year:

* **Bottom-up flagship goals:** I'd like to have more flagship goals and make them smaller in scope and more concrete. I want team leads to think about which goals they would make as flagship. We can narrow it down during July 21 to Aug 1.
* **More aggressive prioritization:** There was clear feedback that we're accepting too many goals. At the same time, I want to make sure we continue to have room for goals that are doing exploratory work.
* **More focus on distributing work:** The plan was to turn the project-goals team into a *well-oiled machine* so that everything ran smoothly, but we didn't quite get there (but big thanks to lqd and spastorino, who were awesome!). We're going to double down on this, but I'd love to also hear from folks who might want to help out. See the end of this mail.

## More detailed survey analysis

### What's working well

People are finding real value in several ways:

**Legitimacy and funding.** Multiple people mentioned this helps with sponsorship and making work visible:
> "The fact that you can say that the thing you're doing is a project goal helps people sponsor it and that's been the value I've seen in it."

**Priority conversations and coordination.** People value the strategic discussions and organizational benefits:
> "It's been good to have the conversation at all about our priorities."

> "I think this is a great way to organize ourselves in the project towards the big actions, to also make them visible and to have a good way between teams and actors to know what are they committing to."

**Clear work descriptions.** People appreciate having concrete descriptions they can share:
> "Having a clear description of a work item that can be shared with others and discussed."

### Room for improvement

There were some common themes here too, and they inform some of the changes we are making.

**More concrete flagship goals.** People want specific deliverables rather than abstract themes. Hopefully the new flagship goal structure will help!
> "I also think that the flagship goals should change, we should have a set of goals, and then subsets of them that form flagships. E.g. we want to stabilize feature X and Y, and that together is a flagship goal for RfL, or something like that. Otherwise the flagship goals are too hand-wavy and broad, without having a concrete set of goals to finish."

**Better team involvement in priority-setting.** People want more collaborative decision-making. Hopefully the designated prioritization period and draft RFC reviews will help.

> "This conversation about priorities felt a bit fake. Mostly Niko deciding something sensible rather than the project actually going through the required conversations to align on the topic."

**More sustainable organization.** People see the value but want to help make it less dependent on any one person. See below for more thoughts on this.

> "It seems like there's too much dependence on Niko, especially if you're going on vacation for 3 weeks in July. Figure out how you can delegate some of the responsibilities to team leads and the project goal team."

## Interested in helping?

So, my intention has always been to "bootstrap" this process and then organize a team around it to run long-term. We got started on that this time, lqd and spastorino prepared a lot of the blog post updates and we made a lot of improvements to the tooling. With Tomas Sedovic coming in to help us get organized, I'm expecting we'll make good progress again, but to really keep things running smoothly, it'd be great to have more help!

Here are some of the things that would be useful.

* **Updating the bot and tooling:** it still needs some love! It'd be great if it would run the pings and prepare the first draft in a more automated fashion.
* **Helping to socialize and prioritize goals:** We want to be more selective, so that means we will need to spend more time reading the goals with teams and collecting feedback. Making sure that members of the relevant teams are aware of the goals being proposed is an imporant first step!
* **Helping to solicit updates and prepare blog posts:** The bot does some of the work, and goal owners providing updates does more, but if we want higher-quality blog posts (something a bunch of people mentioned), it'll require some humans to write them. If we just had four people sign up to write one month each, we'd be all set!

If you'd like to help the Rust goal program run more smoothly, check in a `#project-goals/meta` and say hi!

If you don't think you have time to be a member of the goal program, there are also some things you can do as a member of the Rust project:

* **Help goal proposals be the best they can be:** During the goal sub mission period (i.e., right now), people are opening PRs on the rust-lang/rust-project-goals repo. Take a look -- see if the motivation makes sense to you. Do you understand what exactly they are proposing to do? Do you think it's realistic? This is the time to be encouraging, and help people flesh out the proposal into something that could really happen. Also, please cc folks who you think might be interested in the goal so they can give feedback.
* **Think about flagship goals:** What does your team want to prioritize? I don't think we should have a flagship goal from every team (that's too much...) but I'd like to have some!
* **Attend the draft reads:** As we narrow down the list of goals I want to have draft reads of the RFC so that people can give more detailed feedback. Pop in!

thanks,

Niko