What's your process for figuring out what metrics to hold product management accountable for?

Here is a rough process I would follow but it really varies a lot depending upon each business:

• Understand Company Objectives and Goals
• Have a clear Product Vision and Strategy that aligns with these goals/objectives
• Create higher level OKR's that can map to KPI's
• Determine the top KPI's the company is interested in driving/moving. Examples are: Business Performance KPIs: Customer counts, Customer / user acquisition, Retention Rate, Churn Rate, Revenue etc.
• Make a prioritized list of these KPI's you can measure. Example Revenue would map to MRR and so on
• Pick top 1-2 KPI's that you will meaningfully impact
• Ensure they are measurable in the given timeframe
• The roadmaps that PM's own should be aligned to these OKR's and KPI's
• Report on progress regularly

Usually I would begin with understanding

1. What are the key customer pain points that I am trying to solve for your customer? Those are my metrics in 9 out of 10 cases
2. Why is my product team funded? What problems am I solving for the business? 

Once I have the initial list, just like all things product management I PRIORITIZE. What matters the most vs what is not as important. 

Now for every item in the list its also crucial to think through what are the counter metrics. A crude example would be, I want to have more paying customers but a counter metric will be revenue from these paying customers. Lets say, I discount my product enough that sky rockets the number of paying customers, a good check and balance would be the total revenue we are getting from these customers. 

This is a hard one as I am sure there are a ton of layers to unpack here. Whenever there is a question around metrics, I would first look to the customer and understand what customer pain points your product area is solving for. Then see how those needs and your business goals align, and how your specific area can help solve for that. If it is a matter of stakeholder management that is a different story, but engineering, product and design should really have shared KPIs.

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.