Setting Goals and Success Criteria › Why Success Criteria Matter

Imagine you've added planning capabilities to your personal assistant. A user asks, "Schedule a team meeting next Tuesday at 2 PM and send the agenda to everyone." The agent goes through its plan, makes several tool calls, and responds, "Done!"

Is that success? Maybe. But what if the meeting was scheduled for the wrong time? What if the agenda was sent to the wrong people? What if it worked perfectly but took five minutes to complete? Without predefined success criteria, you're left guessing.

Clear success criteria serve several purposes:

• They make success concrete. Instead of "works well," you have "correctly schedules meetings 95% of the time."
• They guide development. When you know what matters, you can prioritize improvements that move the needle.
• They enable systematic testing. You can create test cases that directly measure whether you're meeting your goals.
• They catch regressions. When you change something, you can verify you haven't broken what already worked.
• They build confidence. Concrete measurements let you deploy with evidence, not hope.

Let's explore how to set these criteria for your agent.