AMA: Microsoft Principal Product Manager, Virgilia Kaur Pruthi on Product Management KPIs

This could really range based upon the company, your users, your target goals, where you are in your business lifecyle, etc.

The most basic ones are: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral

You could also be measuring customer lifetime value

In regards to the worst KPIs, honestly those that cannot be discretely measured and tracked over a specific time period. Vanity metrics (e.g. the number of views from a marketing article or number of shares of a post) really add no value.

This could really range based upon the company, your users, your target goals, where you are in your business lifecyle, etc.

The most basic ones are: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral

You could also be measuring customer lifetime value. 

Again this will really depend upon what type of business you are in.

Such a great question! When you first set a KPI especially if you are in a new market and/or in a new product/customer space, it can feel uneasy. The best way I have learned is by setting something and tracking it over time, seeing if there is any measurable change. If not start by marking out the customer's journey (no matter who they are) and see if you can collect data on their interactions along the way. This may reveal some hidden trends you weren't yet measuring.

Creating the right mechanisms to manage your stakeholders is critical to managing up and across. Allowing your stakeholders to stay on the pulse of your product while having access to updates really helps in building trust. Creating mechanisms like brownbag/learning sessions on a frequent basis (weekly or biweekly basis) also helps in creating an open forum. Then you can focus on protecting your engineering/design team and enabling yourself to scale.

It really depends on what type of business it is. For instance, a product feature or product should be so frictionless that it allows users to onboard (adopt) easily once they are in the experience. Product marketing is responsible for bringing users to that experience. So it is almost eyeballs vs. activation. In reality these metrics should be shared, and over time broken up where the tech is meant to solve for the customer's need.

I'd love to learn more about what you mean by this. In reality they shouldn't change, your customers would just be internal that's all. You could still measure activation, activation, retention, engagement, resolution time, etc. On the other hand, you could measure self help vs. those who still asked for support or metrics lik elatency.

This is a hard one as I am sure there are a ton of layers to unpack here. Whenever there is a question around metrics, I would first look to the customer and understand what customer pain points your product area is solving for. Then see how those needs and your business goals align, and how your specific area can help solve for that. If it is a matter of stakeholder management that is a different story, but engineering, product and design should really have shared KPIs.

Product teams in my opinion consist of product, engineering, and design (at a minimum). With that said, product KPIs should always be shared with engineering since what they are building essentially impacts the KPIs of the product in question. All the work that product teams do should always build up back to the overall company/business unit objectives (even if those metrics are more technical).

Don't think of it of what you should and should not own. Think about what makes sense to the customers you are focusing on. Then think about where you are in the customer/product lifecycle and product/market fit. What does the overall business care about at this time (e.g. retention vs. acquisition) and start seeing how your product area could contribute back to that overall goal.