AMA: Shopify Director of Product, Checkout & B2B, Mani Fazeli on Product Management KPI's

Becoming more KPI driven is a matter of desire and taste. No person, team, or organization attempts to change without believing that behaving differently will result in an improved outcome they care about. It's only possible when leaders buy into how it would improve the success of their teams and business (e.g. profitability, valuation growth, employee engagement, talent retention, positive social impact, etc.) Some companies are steadfast that the use of KPIs should not equate to being data dr ...Read More

Let's cover this in two ways: (1) how to think about KPIs, (2) examples of poor ones and how they can be better. I'll also approach the question a little more broadly than Product Managers alone. Remember that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used at all levels of a company (e.g. project, team, group, division, exec team) with different levels of fidelity and lag (e.g. daily active user vs. quarterly revenue). The appropriateness of standard KPIs will also differ by industry (e.g. commerce ...Read More

Products must have some connection back to profitability, helping to either increase income or reduce costs. You otherwise wouldn't want to make an investment unless you're choosing to make a donation to the greater good (e.g. open source). It's OK if that connection is indirect, and in some cases, even difficult to measure. The latter requires leaders to agree that the approach to measurement is inline with the values and product principles of the company. It's easiest to use examples, and I'll ...Read More

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are driven by three factors: (1) industry standard expectations by customers, (2) differentiating your product when marketing, (3) direct correlation with improving KPIs. For checkout, you'll have uptime as an industry standard, but it's insufficient because subsystems of a checkout can malfunction without the checkout process outright failling. You could consider latency or throughput as market differentiators and would need instrumentation on APIs and client resp ...Read More

Setting KPIs should not feel arbitrary. That's a smell. It means that the people choosing those metrics or setting their targets don't clearly understand how they influence the business or the outcomes desired. Perhaps good modeling has never been done to demonstrate either correlation or causation. When it comes to entering new markets, my opinions change. My approach to leadership is to measure and model things that are known or knowable. Entirely new products or markets will, at best, be unde ...Read More