At what point do you talk about success metrics with your development team?

Answer

11 Answers

Product Development Process

Advaita Nigudkar

BILL Director Product Management • 8mo

I believe it's important to bring the development team in early — not just on the what, but on the why and how we’ll measure success. Success metrics shouldn’t be an afterthought. If we’re asking engineers to invest time and energy into building something, we need to be aligned upfront on how we’ll know if it’s working. That means having conversations early in the product discovery or planning phase about: What outcomes we’re trying to drive (business or customer impact) How we’ll measure them ( ...Read More

876 Views
DJ Chung

Shopify Senior Staff Product Manager • 3y
At the beginning of the project. Before we start implementation, I make sure to define:
- What problem are we trying to solve and for whom?
- Why is this problem important to solve?
- What is the business impact?
- How does this project ladder up to the broader product/company strategy?
- How will we measure success?
2,627 Views
Aleks Bass

Typeform Chief Product Officer • 3y

Our team believes that success metrics have the highest likelihood of driving focus and execution quality when they are tied to our strategy and something we consistently track and explore. Our teams are well versed in our strategy and the related metrics we are trying to move. We, therefore, set our success metrics early in our opportunity assessment phase. We maintain flexibility and will adjust as necessary if new information surfaces throughout our product development lifecycle that suggests ...Read More

703 Views
Poorvi Shrivastav

Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

Success metrics are key to implementing the strategy. As soon as we decide what we are building, we align on success criteria, instrumentation/data collection, and how we will use the data to course correct or decide the future course of action. For example, with experimentation at Meta, we locked in metrics with Engineering and Data Science early on in the cycle during the strategic planning process.

384 Views
C. Todd Lombardo

Co-author Product Roadmaps Relaunched | Formerly Openly, MachineMetrics, ConstantContact, Vempathy, Fresh Tilled Soil • 2y

As soon as we start talking about the idea. PMs need to have a hypothesis about what a good outcome looks lie in the beginning.

For example we were talking about some changes to our API recently and I asked if there was a way we could measure how many accounts change thier use of our API to include a particualr type of call and it turns out we have a bunsh of monitoring already in place!

876 Views
Sirisha Machiraju

Level AI VP of Product • 2y

Success metrics should be front and center of every conversation from the get go. Success metric is what I would refer to as ‘impact number’ or key results in an OKR. When defining the "why" behind every opportunity, a PM should identify the impact first. This impact helps not only drive prioritization but should also be used by development teams to understand the impact that their work has on the business and users. So my recommendation is that there is not a good time to talk about these metri ...Read More

847 Views
Mike Flouton

Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

Metrics work best when they are continuously embedded into the process. We use OKRs, and cascade them down from top level corporate goals into product line metrics, product team metrics and sprint metrics. Use them in a regular cadence to assess progress towards high level strategic objectives. We continually refer to them, in quarterly business reviews, sprint retrospectives, grooming and planning.

455 Views
Katherine Man

HubSpot Group Product Manager, CRM Platform • 2y

Success metrics should be discussed early with engineers to ensure alignment with the product or feature's goals. By setting these metrics early, it helps prioritize what features to build and define how success will be measured. While it's fine for the metrics to change as new learnings come up, it's important to involve engineers early and often. Many times engineers will also help pull the success metrics data so they need to understand why it's important.

909 Views
Saikat Paul

Asana Former Head of Product Operations | Formerly Adobe • 2y

Short answer: Always :) Seriously, discussing success metrics with your development team is essential to ensure alignment on project and sprint goals, plus it's a great motivational tool. Everyone loves to know how their work contributes to the overall success of the product. Here's when you should bring up success metrics: Early Stage Planning: Success metrics should be discussed during the early stages of project planning. As you define project goals and objectives, it's crucial to identify th ...Read More

712 Views
Laura Oppenheimer

Bubble Group Product Manager | Formerly Quizlet, Chegg • 3y

At the very beginning! It's so important to align on the why for any initiative. Why now? Why is it important? And a big part of that why is what the world will look like when you're ultimately very successful. To bring that to light, I usually define 1) a success metric -- the one thing we're going to focus on moving and 2) the health metrics -- what we need to watch to make sure that we aren't tanking another key metric with our project. The more invested you can get the folks you work with i ...Read More

432 Views