AMA: Matterport Head of Product, Preethy Vaidyanathan on Product Management KPI's

Some tips on product management OKR if your organization uses OKR framework and cascading down to functional teams * Use this opportunity to align product priorities with company goals. Especially focusing on customer adoption and product engagement drivers * Think beyond feature completion and also focus on customer/business outcomes. Leverage this to align with Engineering and use this opportunity to change definition of done from ‘release complete’ to ‘meeting customer/business goals’ with roadmap features * It's also a great way to align with x-functional teams, especially Sales and Marketing functions for successful operational execution for product launches

This change can be driven by focusing on fostering a data-forward culture. Start by ensuring all your product teams have clarity of vision and outcome goals. * This leads to product backlog features having clear, measurable and time bound goals * During roadmap planning, use these backlog goals as input for prioritization * Lead your team to embrace outcome-focused product launches. Change ‘Done’ definition from ‘development complete’ to ‘when customer and/or business goals are met’ Another important ingredient is creating a healthy atmosphere for ownership. Embrace a fail fast and learn faster approach and give your teams the ownership, accountability and support to be KPI-driven.

There may be a number of reasons why your product does not involve monetization. Whatever the reason maybe, it is still important to have a definition for ‘success’. For example: * It may be an essential platform feature that is table-stakes for your customers, so your strategy is to not charge for the feature. In this case, you may use daily/weekly/monthly usage of the feature to validate customer engagement. * It may be a free-product that is meant to drive brand awareness and not direct revenue. Getting to a certain market share with free subscribers as a goal could be used to measure brand recall health. * You could be creating products for internal teams to drive operational efficiency. Man hours saved or product quality metrics like average time to solve could be used to track success. If you want to create an outcome-focused, data-driven product culture, then go beyond just monetized products and have clear success goal posts for every product.

Work with your engineering partners to change the definition of done ‘development complete’ to ‘when customer and/or business goals are met’. An important ingredient is KPIs that measure first month/first quarter product launch impact. Oftentimes, this will require product and engineering teams to think through leading and lagging KPIs. A good example of this is enterprise sale cycles could be 5-6+ months; so lagging KPIs like customer logos, enterprise customer adoption and retention, customer case studies will take multiple quarters after a product launch. Use leading indicators like # of sales pitches/product demos, opportunities created to measure product launch short-term impact and create shared goals with your engineering teams.

There are three broad categories of customer feedback: improvements to existing products, strategic customer problem areas when you zoom out for long-term planning and active customer engagement on existing roadmap. Improvements to existing products: * This is usually the most robust feedback loop where both product teams as well as cross-functional partners in sales, support, customer service all have customer insights on how current products and features can be improved. This is something to continue to nurture. Strategic customer and market feedback: * This is an area of investment to specifically focus. This typically happens in alignment with the company 's strategic planning process. This is an important area to continue to confirm strategic bets and long-term planning. Active engagement on roadmap: * An area to focus to ensure that there is continuous engagement with your customers throughout your product development cycle. Active investment here will be very beneficial to architect product launches are consistently set up to drive successful adoption.