AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Management KPIs

The worst KPIs are vanity metrics that have no ties back to actual adoption or business metrics. I once had a product manager commit to hitting a number of emails a notification system was supposed to send in a 30-day period. Without context, this seems like a great metric to track for volume, except the total count of emails tells you nothing about how many people are getting value, if they are getting value, if they are recurring users, or if the emails are contributing to user satisfaction. T ...Read More

Many product organizations focus on delivery, Net Promoter Score, and user counts. One metric that I think is important to always consider is your availability and consistency of user experience in the performance of the application (latency). Using Error Budgets and thinking about uptime critically as a Product Manager helps put into tangible terms the cost to the user when your offering does not meet a performance or uptime standard. If you are offering mission-critical software, it is essenti ...Read More

Objectives and Key Results are meant to encourage cross-functional alignment and collaboration. In product management, it is essential to think of OKRs as a method for prioritizing scope that will help drive the top business KPIs, so that your product roadmap has a built-in mechanism for considering how to help the business succeed.  The below example is one I have seen work well:  Top Level Business Objective: Increase enterprise ARR by 20% Product Key Result: Deliver paid feature X to help com ...Read More

This is a great question. I am a fan of actually being ambitious and setting unrealistic targets or stretch goals and seeing where we end up in the first couple of reporting periods. To get a dose of realism, you can always reference analyst reports and right-size your total available market vs. serviceable market and current penetration into the new market. I don't advise setting realistic targets when entering new markets because that can lead to complacency instead of innovation. You can also ...Read More

Oftentimes as a Product leader, I am tasked with cross-functional work across Go-to-market, R&D, and finance. One of the most critical aspects of cross-functional is to drive clarity. This can be done by following three practices:  Have a published single-source-of-truth charter where current status and archived information live. This repository can be a word document, google sheet, or even a static website. You will want to add "pins" to any relevant documents or links at the top for easy a ...Read More

Engineering and Product are two sides of a smooth sailing R&D engine. I have seen a number of ways to split the accountability across these groups:  Say/Do ratios - which include hitting a certain percentage of items that are delivered in an iteration  Merge Request Rate - which is about throughput and encourages shipping small and fast  Cycle Time - which is the time it takes from ideation to production, or any other time spent in a certain workflow status  These three are my three favorite ...Read More