AMA: JetBrains Head of Product, Orit Golowinski on Product Management KPI's

For me, the worst KPIs for Product Managers are the ones that measure output instead of outcome, or that can look great on a slide while customers and the business see no value. The clearest example is: Number of features shipped.This is basically a development or throughput metric, not a product metric. I can ship ten features or a thousand features that: no one discovers no one uses don’t move revenue, retention, or satisfaction at all On paper, I “hit the KPI”, but in reality nothing got bett ...Read More

When I think about good OKRs for product management, I start from one principle:they should describe business outcomes created for customers, not project completion. So instead of “ship feature X by Q3" ,I aim for something like "help this user segment reach a concrete result” with key results that are measurable. I usually aim for OKRs that are: Customer-led: phrased in terms of what changes for the user. Business-tied: clearly connect to revenue, retention, adoption, or efficiency. Outcome-foc ...Read More

When I define KPIs for a product and for a team, I start from the maturity of the company and the clarity of the company goals. In more mature companies, where there are clear company OKRs and north-star metrics, I anchor my KPIs directly to those. I look at the existing company OKRs / metrics and ask:Which of these should my product help with, and in what way?For example: If a company goal is to increase expansion revenue from existing customers, my product KPIs might be: % of existing customer ...Read More

When building products for developers, the core principle to start from is: don’t break their flow. Developers are already juggling a lot – writing code, tests, thinking about security, understanding production, CI/CD, cloud. If a feature requires them to stop what they’re doing, open a new tab, or learn a separate dashboard, it usually just won’t get used. So I focus on giving value exactly where they already are: in the IDE, in the pull request, or in the CLI. That also shapes how much to give ...Read More

When I want to avoid proxy KPIs and measure the real thing, I do three simple things: 1. Start with a plain-language outcome Before thinking about numbers, I write one clear sentence about what success actually is, in customer and business terms. For example: “New developers can start contributing meaningful code within 2 days.” “Most security issues are fixed before code is merged.” “AI-generated code is actually used and kept, not rewritten.” Only after that do I ask:“What can I measure that w ...Read More