What is an important KPI that you see product teams completely missing?

This is a good one. I think there are two that often get missed and largely it is because they are hard to measure and expensive to move. Product excellence. How do you measure customer delight in an impactful way? CSAT and NPS have lots of opportunities to be gamed and are frankly easily ignored. Some of the best products I've used focus on finding the right critical user journeys and continuously measure the success rates of those quantitatively and qualitatively Product health. Cold boot, war ...Read More

I have sometimes seen Product teams focus on impact instead of landed impact. And while there is a lot of nuance in that answer I think landed impact is often the most overlooked KPI or OKR or goal (however you like to call them). Teams will goal on number of users or shipping a feature rather than goal on the impact enabled by those metric. Take your typical B2B SaaS for instance. 200 active users of a feature on day 1 is an ok measure of success. But what really matters is what those 200 activ ...Read More

PSA: This perspective comes from a product-led growth company where value is measured not just by usage but by how deeply a product integrates into a customer’s workflow and delivers sustained impact. Most product teams track engagement, usage, or satisfaction. Those metrics are useful, but they are surface-level. The KPI I see most often missing is contextual value - understanding how what we’re building changes the customer’s workflow, drives measurable improvement, or differentiates us from c ...Read More

Many data-driven Product Management (PM) teams often overlook long-term strategic KPIs, such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), by focusing on short-term metrics like quarterly margins or one-off transactions. This approach can be detrimental, as retaining customers typically yields higher CLV and reduces churn-related costs. Another critical KPI often missed is Feature Discoverability and Time to Value. Despite having sophisticated features, users rarely utilize them due to: Difficulty Finding F ...Read More

Interestingly enough I see two trends in the types of KPIs product teams miss.  1) Aligning with the larger's organization or business goals - Ensuring that your product roadmap is actually impacting the success metrics (OKRs, KPIs) of the business itself is critical to knowing if you are investing in and prioritizing the right work. 2) Capturing "technical or engineering" metrics - Any work that your team spends time on should be impacting some metric. Even metrics that are technical (the most ...Read More

This is a great question. In my opinion, a lot of product teams especially ones that are focussed on customer-facing products completely miss tracking product health KPIs like bugs in the product, product uptime, and product reliability to name a few. Most product teams miss them as this product health metric is not tied directly to any business objective and is considered an engineering vanity metric. The reality however is this KPI is really critical and can inform customer experience that can ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

Many product organizations focus on delivery, Net Promoter Score, and user counts. One metric that I think is important to always consider is your availability and consistency of user experience in the performance of the application (latency). Using Error Budgets and thinking about uptime critically as a Product Manager helps put into tangible terms the cost to the user when your offering does not meet a performance or uptime standard. If you are offering mission-critical software, it is essenti ...Read More

There is not one, uniform KPI that I think product teams completely miss. What I see sometimes is the lack of a value thesis: product managers wave around metrics they want to collect, but they don't have a hypothesis about the target for that metric and on what timeline after feature delivery they expect to see that target achieved. Now, being mindful of Goodhart's Law, I usually tell PMs that I'm unlikely to hold them accountable to these targets if they have a good explanation for why they we ...Read More

One of the most overlooked KPIs in product teams is Time-to-Value (TTV) — how quickly a user experiences the core value after adopting the product. Teams often obsess over acquisition, engagement, or feature delivery, but miss whether users actually get value fast enough to stick around. A long TTV is a silent killer of retention, adoption, and word-of-mouth growth. TTV bridges product and customer experience — it forces PMs to ask: How many steps, minutes, or clicks does it take for a new user ...Read More

This is not a single KPI, but often in the past, I've seen KPIs set that are not tied back in any way to broader business goals. For example, if a product manager on my team came to me and said, "My KPI for this product launch is 30% adoption in the first month." My first question would be, "How does that relate to our broader business goals of increasing net retention or driving trial conversions?" That KPI should only be measuring adoption if think it will directly impact one of those broader ...Read More

I'll change the question slightly and answer more broadly:) I have found that product management is good at defining "output metrics" for e.g. active customers, retention%, and revenue impact. The second set of metrics PMs love to talk about our funnel conversions. However, where the metrics need to get more solid are around engagement - what are the "input metrics" that give you confidence that your customers are engaging with the product and as you build new capabilities how do you make sure t ...Read More

For me, two main KPIs that should be the center of attention, time to value and product activation rate. It's shocking how many product teams obsess over metrics like churn, retention, or NPS while completely overlooking how long it takes for users to experience the core value of the product. TTV mainly directly correlates with customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. If your users don’t quickly experience value, they’re more likely to leave, no matter how great your onboarding is or how str ...Read More