How do product KPI’s change with a self-serve product?

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.

They don't change that much. While most of your KPIs will be around conversion, efficiency and time to completion, you should also be focusing on customer enjoyment/delight/satisfaction. I recommend looking into CSAT or NPS to ensure people enjoy the experience of using your product and would recommend it to their friends. If people are effective on the platform but don't enjoy it, you could see a competitor come and eat your lunch.

The biggest change is the importance product plays in customer acquisition via trials and retaining customers past the 90-day onboarding period. When a product is self-serve, a PM should be paying attention to how their features drive trial conversion and the role they play in the customer onboarding process. This is often determined by identifying the drivers of PQLs (product qualified leads). So, for example, if we know customers that convert always use some combination of X, Y, and Z features within a few days of signing up for a trial, we will not only work to ensure that feature experience is excellent, but partner with PMM to make sure we are pushing all trial users to adopt those features rapidly.

Similarly with onboarding, we want to ensure customers are adopting our stickiest features as quickly as possible. With self-serve products, customers are typically paying month-to-month and can shop around at their leisure if a product isn't suiting their needs. (This is in contrast to SaaS tools that are contract based and typically sold on a yearly cycle with upgrades by seat addtions.) PMs should analyze what their most successful customers look like (defined by some combo of product usage/NPS/age for example) and then look for patterns in the product usage of those customers. Once patterns emerge, say, a customer uploads a list of contacts within the first three days, again, you want to push all customers to take similar action. Even better if you can segment customers based on use case and push them toward the feature usage most relevant to their business/vertical.

Another area to focus KPIs for self-serve is on tier or package upgrades and add-ons. What features are we building that make sense on a higher tier of our product that we can leverage for upgrades in the future? Is it a subset of the feature or the entire feature?

Customers are humans who attempt to take care of matters themselves instead of reaching out for answers or support. One important KPI the self serve product is the Self-Service Rate. It is percentage of queries that customers solve by themselves over the total number of queries raised by the customer.

Key ways to keep on top of this KPI is

• Ensure your self-service resources are comprehensive, up-to-date, and easily accessible.

• Promote self-service options through proactive communication with customers.

• Monitor user feedback and continuously improve self-service resources based on customer needs.

See question: “What are good OKRs for product management?” for a general introduction to the topic.

This questions highly depends on the context of the market, and the product we are talking about. I would refrain from making a general statement that would likely be inaccurate for your context, and instead highly recommend to execute a solid scientific methodology to come up with the new numbers you want to track as you pivot your product portfolio.

See question: “How do you approach setting crisp KPIs and targets for Engine features and linking them to your topline metrics?” for my step by step process for realistic OKRs.