What are good OKRs for product management?
This could really range based upon the company, your users, your target goals, where you are in your business lifecyle, etc.
The most basic ones are: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral
You could also be measuring customer lifetime value.
Again this will really depend upon what type of business you are in.
Objectives and Key Results are meant to encourage cross-functional alignment and collaboration. In product management, it is essential to think of OKRs as a method for prioritizing scope that will help drive the top business KPIs, so that your product roadmap has a built-in mechanism for considering how to help the business succeed.
The below example is one I have seen work well:
- Top Level Business Objective: Increase enterprise ARR by 20%
- Product Key Result: Deliver paid feature X to help compete and close 3 sales pipeline deals
- Product Key Result: Implement use case documentation for paid features to support Field Team
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.
Some tips on product management OKR if your organization uses OKR framework and cascading down to functional teams
Use this opportunity to align product priorities with company goals. Especially focusing on customer adoption and product engagement drivers
Think beyond feature completion and also focus on customer/business outcomes. Leverage this to align with Engineering and use this opportunity to change definition of done from ‘release complete’ to ‘meeting customer/business goals’ with roadmap features
It's also a great way to align with x-functional teams, especially Sales and Marketing functions for successful operational execution for product launches