AMA: Gainsight Director, Product Management, Sailaja Kalle on Product Management KPI's

An ideal Product team would be the one which is aligned and transparent to larger organisation in terms of where they are, where they are going and how they plan to go there. The team is complementary to one another, have great e people skills, have the right process and one that challenges assumptions. 1. Being customer centric and vision alignment to Organization goals is something that this team needs to get right 2. Empowering the team and identifying how well the team manages their Financial KPIS, Customer Satisfaction KPIs, User Engagement KPIs etc is something that will need to measured. 3. How well they complement and work as a team is super crucial especially if the team has high skilled members. One bad apple will spoil the whole lot. So trying to keep an eye on this and managing it is something that ensures the success of team and Organisation as a whole.

Once we choose a team that defines the path to the success of the team - its important to identofy metrics by groups of Financial KPIs, Product KPIs and Customer Satisfaction KPIs. Each product has its own set or group of metrics that are relevant. The idea is to choose metrics to help improve the Product , help drive decisions.

In a startup, PMs have additional responsibility in ensuring success of the product and customers. My suggestion would be to focus on customer satisfaction, success/retention and support satisfaction. KPIs like 1. Active users 2. MRR 3. ARR 4. Speed to resolution on Support ticket and its Life cycle KPIs 5. Customer Acquisition cost These parameters will help give the teams to take data driven decisions crucial for navigating a startup to success

A seamless way to created Shared KPIs would be to blend and work together on building features. While defining say a PRD, work with Product Marketing team to create a 1 pager on how to market the feature and why it is important to build the feature. This ensures, we have buy in from both teams - one who wants to build a feature and also on one who ultimately is responsible for marketing the feature that the right problems are picked and being addressed by the teams. This also allows for the teams to colloborate and build the right experiences for the customers.

KPIs can help identify that in a new market whether we have got the right product fit. This alone will allow to define the right metrics. The key goals could be 1. Acquisition – how well are you getting customers to your site or app? 2. Activation – are your customers having a great ‘first run’ experience? 3. Retention – how often are your customers coming back? 4. Referral – are they telling others about your product? 5. Revenue – are they paying for your service? Identify the right KPIs that can give data to answer whether above goals are met or not.

There can be 2 sets of KPIs that can be "worst" metrics. 1. The set that we cannot commit to. 2. The set that we can commit , track tasks completed but dont measure outcomes. We need KPIs that cover the whole ground - Product and how customers are receiving the product and Financial goals of the Organisation.