AMA: Pendo Chief Product Officer, Trisha Price on Product Management KPI's

KPIs need to be relatable to the team and part of your product and company cadence. They also need to tie to the company goals. I like to utilize yearly and quarterly planning for the company as the start of the product team cadence and then spend time with the product team to ensure we measure what matters. For example, if you are trying to drive growth - map out new product launches and tie the KPIs to the launch. If you are trying to reduce costs, tie your KPIs to reduction of support tickets or other manual process around the company. It is important that the KPIs have context for your entire team so that they understand why they are important and how their work impacts the success. Teams cannot only focus on KPIs, they need to also have a vision, communication and most importantly maniacal focus on customers!

This depends on where the product is in its lifecycle, but in general, product usage (growth of number of users, breadth of features used, and frequency of usage) are great indicators of product success. There are also other metrics you can measure to determine if a customer is getting value from your product - one example is if they are sharing results from your product or inviting others to the product. This is indicative of value and an interesting metric.

Product strategy is broad, so I like to break this down into pieces. At Pendo, at least twice a year the product leadership team completes a written update of the strategy, investment allocation suggestions, and goals for the year to the C Suite. This typically involves a few options, where the C suite weighs in with their thoughts as well. At our Company Kick Off, we provide the entire company with an update of the product strategy and vision, and the output gets incorporated into sales materials. But that is just the broad strategy, because each of our products also has a strategy, which is in alignment with company goals and customer and market needs. The strategy of each product is presented quarterly at a review for all executives at the company along with the measurable goals (usage, PMF score, ARR, competitive win rate). While we use the quarterly update meeting as a chance to align, the status of goals are visable in dashboards for anyone at the company to see and status of product launches is also visible for anyone to see.

There are so many great tools out there! We recently used NotebookLM to create a "podcast" style update for a product strategy. It was a lot of fun and worked well. We provided several documents to the tool and it was able to quickly create an engaging podcast for the rest of the company. We also use LLMs in Pendo to summarize customer feedback to support our product prioritization. I utilized Zelta.ai to understand trends in support tickets and what customers were saying in sales calls, and it made such an impact on us that we acquired Zelta! This information really helps align sales, support and product around the most meaningful enhancements we can make to ensure our customers love our product.

It is important to focus on outcomes, not only shipping features. We can deliver features and not deliver outcomes, so in terms of KPIs, I tend to focus on ARR, or beta sign-ups, or customer usage of what we ship. Getting teams to rally around major milestones (like a conference where we launch a new product) works well and gets teams excited to deliver to a date. Creating visable, shared dashboards where we monitor and celebrate these outcomes (KPIs) helps drive positive behaviors. When we miss, we must do a retrospective to understand what happened and how we grow from it. This should be no different then any other team at the company.