AMA: Twilio Director of Product Marketing, Lindsey Weinig on Product Marketing KPI's

A few important considerations when considering PMM KPIs: 1. Causation vs. Correlation: Some KPIs are impossible to track back to PMM efforts. These correlated efforts can be difficult to tie back due to limited visibility/tracking, complexity of engagements, or awareness-nature of the activities. Some of these KPIs are still valuable to build alignment and drive collaboration, but it's important to also have KPIs that can be directly tied back to PMM efforts. 2. Product Led Growth vs. Sales-led: Are you looking to drive customers to complete activities directly on your app or website? Or do you want them to get to your sales team to close? Your activites and your measures should differ depending on your focus. This can your entire business strategy or can vary by product, or even quarter. 3. Deliverable Metrics vs. Outcome Metrics: Building benchmarks on deliverable views/downloads and web traffic are great for maintaining visibility in the health/value of your deliverables. Meanwhile, outcome driven metrics are better for ensuring what you delivery is working. Does it speak to your target audience and drive them to action? Usually these metrics are signups, upgrades, purchase etc. 4. KPIs vs. OKRs: Key Performance Indicators are used to determine if you're doing what you intend to do. These should be fairly evergreen in nature with benchmarks to know the definition of 'good' vs. 'great'. These metrics help you determine where to make adjustments, where to give more attention at a given time. There should be several of these that are monitored regulary. Objectives and Key Results on the other hand are used to drive special focus. These should define what strategic priority or initiative is outside of the day-to-day that you're working on and want to improve. There should be very few of these as their intent is to drive focus. The expectations and definitions for success between KPIs and OKRs should also differ greatly.

You have to start somewhere! I recommend setting a KPI for a limited period (month/quarter) to 'Create a benchmark for X KPI'. This ensures the expectation is clear that you are starting at square 1. And from that period forward you can use that measure as a benchmark and continue to improve as you gather more data over time.

This is tricky. It's very important to build alignment across team with shared KPIs at a high level, (including product revenue or conversion rates), while also identifying KPIs that are more directly within Product Marketing control (like pipe generation, or MQLs). Having these higher altitude shared goals are valuable because they ensure that all teams are taking ownership of getting to the end result, driving collaboration across teams and through all of the steps to get there from Marketing, Sales Enablement, GTM, Sales Operations, etc. If we only focus on direct outcomes for PMM, we risk getting initiatives only partway to where we need to go as a business. I've seen this issue many times where MQLs don't get scored or followed up on, and then don't drive product revenue for example.

Best case, your company has some strategic KPIs that your KPIs can feed into. If there isn't a formalized process for documenting and sharing these, I recommend taking the initiative to do so. Either in a deck or doc, detail your KPIs, how they ladder up into the business KPIs and the cadence (usually quarterly, but sometimes monthly) in which you'll be reporting back on progress. It's also best practice to share with your key stakeholders for feedback prior to finalizing, and then offer some option, either live or async for reporting on them, sharing what's working/not working and to continue to gather feedback on progress.