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

Question

Patrick Davis · Accepted Answer

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.

1. 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
 2. Product health. Cold boot, warm boot, latency for critical actions, crashes, uptime. All of these things contribute to Product excellence but are much more directly measurable and can really sneak up on you

Paresh Vakhariya · Answer

* In terms of KPI's shared between product and engineering, I would say "Effective Resource Utilization" can be missed primarily because it can be hard to track and measure across projects/teams.
 * "Internal team satisfaction" is another one that PM's may not include but this is an extremely important metric that provides a good idea of the health of the team and organization. This should not be missed.

Virgilia Kaur Pruthi (she/her) · Answer

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 common one being latency) should be captured, reported on, and measured over time.

Jacqueline Porter · Answer

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 essential to be responsive and reliable. Lack of responsiveness and reliability can erode your base over time.

Becky Trevino · Answer

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 the solution?

Several PMs, like me, have engineering backgrounds. This is great because engineers are deep thinkers but the downside is our problem-solving nature can force us to forget the commercial side of our job. We're here to build products that generate revenue, retain cusotmers, and drive profitability. If we can't tie back to those things, we're missing a big part of the job.

Ashka Vakil · Answer

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 translate to customer satisfaction and retention.

Sharad Goel · Answer

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 that you don't get lost in the noise.

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