AMA: Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions, Daniel Kuperman on Product Marketing KPI's

Your influence as a PMM varies drastically across departments. For a traditional B2B sales-led organization, for example, it may include competitive win rates and deal cycle times for the sale department; placement in analyst reports for the marketing communications team; the number of deals sourced by partners for the partner marketing team, as some examples. Identify the core business goals at your company, and which department drives them. Then, look at how product marketing works with those teams to help them achieve their goals. You can then identify specific indicators that will tell you whether the work you are doing in PMM is creating an impact.

Goal setting and performance indicators can vary based on the methodology your company uses. For some, the OKR method drives all goal-setting and KPI formulation; for others, it will have a different set of attributes and hierarchies. Regardless of what method you use to design the core indicators for the business, in most cases, the individual 'indicators' or performance metrics will follow a SMART way of writing them (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Another good framework to consider is FAST - Frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, transparent. A good article outlining FAST vs SMART is here: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/with-goals-fast-beats-smart/. Whatever method or formula is used, make sure to frequently communicate the KPIs being used, track their performance, and discuss with the team the current status. Use them to rally the team around core priorities and anchor the projects your team is working on around them.

Many of your KPIs will be tied to business metrics which will in turn be tracked based on sales data, financial data, and more. If you are at a larger organization, you may have a data science team that uses business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or similar and they can pull in data from multiple data sources to create dashboards to track your KPIs. If you work at a smaller organization, you may need to cobble together KPI's from different systems and put them all in a page (Confluence, Notion, G-Docs, etc.) so that you can easily track and share with your team.

There are several indicators companies can use to measure and prevent churn, but many factors will influence the best ones for you such as whether your business is a PLG or sales-led, if your product is freemium, whether your company is an early stage vs late stage startup, and more. But basically, consider the following: * Customer health score: This tells you whether a particular customer is happy or unhappy with your company and may be a leading indicator of churn. This score is typically a formula that considers the customer's overall satisfaction (NPS), support requests resolved over time, number of escalations, and more. * Customer engagement: if the customer is not 'engaged' with your product, this can lead to churn. No one wants to pay for something they don't use. You may want to track engagement with your product overall or with specific features. It will be important to determine what "engagement" means to your company (e.g. login within a specific timeframe, use of certain features, or a number of features used in sequence, etc.). * Active users: Similar to the 'customer engagement' metric, this looks at how many of the total users that the customer has paid for are actively using the product. If a customer purchased, let's say, licenses for 100 users but only 10 have been active in the past 30 days it could indicate a propensity to churn. * Renewals: Customers that don't renew their subscriptions on time are more likely to churn. You can establish a process for reaching out to customers to prompt them to start the renewal process 30, 60, or even 90 days before their subscription (for SaaS products) expires. Keeping track of renewal schedules is important to prevent churn and start mitigation processes in case customers indicate they don't intend to renew their licenses. * NPS: The key indicator of customer satisfaction, the net promoter score, is widely used across industries to understand whether customers are loyal and if they will churn.

This varies a lot by company, but for the most part, product marketing metrics should tie closely with business metrics such as revenue (bookings, MRR, ARR, etc.), pipeline (opportunities created, dollar value of opportunities, etc.), and product (signups, trials, usage, etc.). Product marketing at PLG companies tends to track metrics related to product activations, product usage, and churn. For sales-led orgs the metrics are related to revenue and pipeline with additional metrics for sales performance and enablement, as well as content usage and influence. In most cases, you will have top-level metrics that are not necessarily PMM owned (e.g. revenue) but are influenced by the work that PMM does. You will also want to track more granular metrics related to work that PMM drives (e.g. content downloads, sales readiness, competitive win rates, etc.). In setting up your product marketing metrics, ask yourself: * What impact will our PMM work have on <business metric>? * Is our work aligned to key business metrics? Which ones? * What part of our work is not tied to a business metric? How do we want to measure its effectiveness? * Are all stakeholders across the business aware and supportive of our PMM metrics? In the end, the metrics you set will help guide the team and align them on the priorities for the business and for themselves. Iterate and get others in the company to weigh in so that you have clear understanding of how your metrics impact others and how you will track them over time.

Each company, depending on their growth stage, will want to use product launches to drive different aspects of the business. Having said that, consider the following: * New product signups; * New revenue coming from the specific features or product launched; * Expansion revenue coming from the launch; * Competitive win rates; * Placement in analyst reports; * Churn rate. Not an exhaustive list by any means, and as I mentioned before, it all depends on what the launch is about (new product, new features, etc.) and the impact you expect it to have on customers, competitors, and market in general. For example, if launching a product feature that has been requested by customers in a certain industry, you will want to measure product signups, revenue, and expansion for customers in that same industry. If you are launching a brand new product to expand your offerings to unlock revenue in a certain market or type of company, your success metrics will have to be tied to that particular GTM motion. There's no KPI list for product launches that applies to all your launches, so you will have to work with other GTM stakeholders (product, sales, channel, etc.) to align on success criteria and weigh the pros and cons of each.

First, identify the main business metrics that your company has established and then tie product marketing metrics that directly impact them. This short list (may be only 3 or 4) are the ones you want to make sure are clearly identified, understood, and reported on. For PLG they might be: 1. Product activations; 2. Product purchases; 3. Customer churn. For sales-led they could be: 1. Marketing-influenced pipeline; 2. Average deal size; 3. Win rate. Depending on your business and how product marketing works within your company, your metrics will vary. IF this is your first time setting up metrics for PMM, create a small list, vet 3 to 5 with other stakeholders from Sales, Customer Success, Product, and revisit them in 6 months. You may need to adjust as you learn what works and how the business is performing, but is better to start somewhere and get going even if you're not 100% certain if you got them all. One other important note on this: the process of coming up with your metrics is as important as the metrics themselves. It will help you and your team to ask critical questions about the work you do, share this info with others across the business, and gain better alignment across teams.