AMA: Snow Software Executive Vice President Product, Becky Trevino on Product Management KPIs

Great question. To create a powerful partnership between Product Marketing (PMM) and Product Management (PM) it's essential for you to have a common set of KPIs that help you understand whether your work is generating the intended results. Warning: For this to work best, it's great for these KPIs to be established as early as you can in the product lifecycle. PMs who wait until the last-minute (think 1-2 sprints before a feature/product will be released) risk not getting the most from this partnership. Here's a process I would follow: 1. Provide the PMM sufficient strategic context of your product (e.g. target customer, intended outcomes product will deliver, business case/written narrative) 2. With the strategic context understood, determine which go-to-market (GTM) metrics matter most in your organization (e.g. Monthly Recurring Revenue, Daily Active Users, etc.) These are the metrics that your leaders would look when gauging whether your product is successful post-launch. Often, this data can be found in #1. 3. With objectives (e.g. what you want to see happen if you everything went as planned) defined in #2, align with PMM on who owns what. For example, do you co-own Daily Active Users (DAU)? Or is DAU only owned by PMM? If DAU is owned by PMM, what key results (e.g. the actions that need to be taken to get to a favorable objective) need to happen for the output to be true (e.g. # of signups need to be X to get to a DAU of Y). 4. Now that you've documented the objectives, key results, and ownership then discuss how you progress will be communicated between PM and PMM and the broader organization. Here it's important ot establish cadence and who communicates what.

To make a product team/organization more KPI driven, it is always best to start at the top. The Head of Product at your organization should provide the broader PM organization with the strategic context of what business objectives are essential for your team to hit. From there the PM team can take that business objective and break it down into their own objective and key result. If you are a product leader seeking to make your organization more KPI driven, what I would do is identify what metrics matter to your business and put those into individual PMs goals. For instance, let's say it's critical for organization to ship Product Y at the end of Q2. PMs Bob and Anna are responsible for Product Y. Then I would make it part of Bob and Anna's individual performance goals that they deliver Product Y by the end of Q2. Of course, there are going to be many reasons why Bob and Anna may not be able to deliver Product Y (the big one being engineering or design). And while these reasons may be true by clearly stating in their performance goals that they are accountable for that deliver this ties Bob and Anna to ensuring that outcome occurs and that they keep you posted on what needs to be done to reach that outcome. If you are an individual contributor seeking to make your organization more KPI driven, I would start with your own product. Ensure that you are aware of the key metrics your organization values (e.g. Annual Recurring Revenue, Daily Active Users, etc.) and determine what key results your product needs to hit to help your team reach that outcome. I'd then focus on sharing your KPIs with your manager and peers in engineering, user experience, and product marketing for alignment. With KPIs aligned, I'd regularly update others on your metrics and show progress. Others will notice and likely start requesting that your peers follow.

When defining the proper KPIs for a specific product and product team, I tend to do the following: 1. Understand the company's broader business objectives. This may require a conversation with your manager. 2. Once I understand the company's broader business objectives, I then find a way to tie my product and team's work to those objectives. This typically leads to a handful thing 3-6 objectives that I want to reach. 3. I then break down those objectives and form key results that would show how I can reach my objective through the key result. 4. Once I have an idea of by OKRs, I then share these with managers and stakeholders to get their perspective and alignment on what I've written. 5. Now that I have alignment, I establish how I am going to report on the data and what tools I'm going to use (e.g. Google Analytics, Pendo) and the the frequency in which I am going to update the broader organization. 

When it comes to product launch, I make Product Marketing responsible for KPIs related to enabling Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. Proroduct Management is then responsible for owning all KPIs related to ensuring Sales Engineers and Support are enabled. I also expect Product Marketing to hold cross-functional launch sessions with these key groups to ensure all items from the launch plan are completed prior to launch. I would encourage PM to develop a similar launch checklist so that PM and PMM are aligned on who does what. If your PMM does not show you a copy of the launch plan, I would ask for it and ensure you two have discussed what they're doing. It's also important for PM to understand what specific tiering your launch is in (e.g. Tier I, II, III) and from there to have a good understanding of waht actual marketing collateral PMM is going to create for your product. Typically PMM will have defined Tier I, II, and III in your organization and what each will provide the product. If you haven't read this, ask your PMM. If your org has not defined this, then I'd ask PMM to do this for you. 

When working with products that are not monetized, it is actually more critical to measure business impact to show the value of your work. Why? Often products that are not monetized, are the first ones to get resources removed when the organizaiton finds itself in a bind. This can be a very big mistake for the organization and why it's critical to get this right. In this scenario, I'd go back to "what value does your product to your business?". And I would then tie KPIs to that value. Let's say your product is an internal tools that helps payroll to be processed faster. Then likely before your product there were X number of people spent on payroll or Y dollars spent on a service. I would focus business impact on those dollars saved by having your product as a reminder of the monetary value your payroll product brought. Then I'd focus on other items like how you've improved processing speed by delivery these X features in the business. Always go with value and then focus on KPIs that showcase that value to your stakeholders.

A good framework I use follows the product adoption lifecyle curve: * At Introduction (think MVP) the main objective is establishing product-market fit. * At Growth you need to shift objectives to focus on maximize growth & share. If you're not profitable at this stage, focus on getting to profitability. * At Maturity, maximize profit and aim to extend the lifetime of the product through diffentiation or adjacent products/segments. * At Decline your focus is to remain profitable and transition cusotmers to what is next. That said, the best OKRs for PMs are to tie Product Management to whatever the company cares about. If you can't tie your work to what is important to the business, then it's going to be very difficult to get funding (e.g. engineering and UX resources, marketing support) for your product so working hard to tie your effort with what hte company cares about is time well spent.

A good framework I use follows the product adoption lifecyle curve: * At Introduction (think MVP) the main objective is establishing product-market fit. * At Growth you need to shift objectives to focus on maximize growth & share. If you're not profitable at this stage, focus on getting to profitability. * At Maturity, maximize profit and aim to extend the lifetime of the product through diffentiation or adjacent products/segments. * At Decline your focus is to remain profitable and transition cusotmers to what is next.

Oftentimes, I find that Product Management teams are focused on getting the product to market that they forget that their #1 job is building a business. As a business leader, you can't be simply focused on the "speeds & feeds" or what next feature needs to be on the roadmap. You really have to understand the product's core value proposition: why would a customer choose your product over the existing way the problem is being solved today? And from here, how do you plan to monetize and scale the solution? Several PMs, like me, have engineering backgrounds. This is great because engineers are deep thinkers but the downside is our problem-solving nature can force us to forget the commercial side of our job. We're here to build products that generate revenue, retain cusotmers, and drive profitability. If we can't tie back to those things, we're missing a big part of the job.