How do you think about shared KPI’s with your engineering team? And what are ones that product teams often miss?

I'm a huge fan of all success metrics and OKRs (objectives and key results) being shared between the core cross functional working group. Of course there will always be some that don't match up; I'm thinking about some SLAs, uptime, latency type KPI's that your engineering team tracks. But by taking them as shared and getting your buy in on those you'll much better understand the deployment of the engineering resources and how best to support that team. All cross functional teams are critical, b ...Read More

Product, Engineering (and even design!) should ensure the majority of the user's experience is measured (engagement, conversion), the platform is functional (speed, etc), and that the company's key metrics are preserved.  A big miss that comes up between product and engineering is when there is confusion around a product experience.Product Perspective: "This is not working as expected. This is a bug"Engineering: "This is what I was asked to build. It's working as specified" This will happen from ...Read More

Shared KPI's between engineering and Product Management is a great way to build high quality, scalable products that are delivered on-time that bring customer delight. This also builds camaraderie and encourages teamwork towards a common goal. There are different ways of achieving this. e.g. PM's and Engineering can own certain KPI's. While both teams can also individually own their own KPI's. Not all have to be shared Generally PM's would own Company, Business, Acquisition, User Engagement and ...Read More

Bringing engineering into KPI discussions is a must for any Product Org, especially when we are considering key B2B business metrics like churn and retention. I think product managers can often get caught in the trap of only considering which new features are going to drive the business forward and excite new customers, but no business will survive on new customers alone. How are you keeping your current customers happy and satisfied with the product? This is where some important engineering-dri ...Read More

Engineering and Product are two sides of a smooth sailing R&D engine. I have seen a number of ways to split the accountability across these groups:  Say/Do ratios - which include hitting a certain percentage of items that are delivered in an iteration  Merge Request Rate - which is about throughput and encourages shipping small and fast  Cycle Time - which is the time it takes from ideation to production, or any other time spent in a certain workflow status  These three are my three favorite ...Read More

Work with your engineering partners to change the definition of done ‘development complete’ to ‘when customer and/or business goals are met’.  An important ingredient is KPIs that measure first month/first quarter product launch impact. Oftentimes, this will require product and engineering teams to think through leading and lagging KPIs. A good example of this is enterprise sale cycles could be 5-6+ months; so lagging KPIs like customer logos, enterprise customer adoption and retention, customer ...Read More