What are the 3-5 key metrics you should always report on in product marketing?

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.

While PMM metrics can vary greatly depending on your go-to-market motion and audience, I believe the most critical metrics should track your core customer journey. At AssemblyAI, where we provide speech-to-text APIs for developers, we focus intensely on developer journey metrics across the lifecycle of our capabilities.

Our key metrics framework centers on three critical areas of the developer journey:

1. Initial Activation

   • Time to first API call (measuring how quickly developers can get started)

   • Signup-to-implementation conversion rate

   • Drop-off points in the initial setup process

2. Feature Adoption

   • Usage rates of new capabilities within first 30 days of release

   • Time to adopt new features after release

   • Cross-feature adoption

3. Usage Expansion

   • API call volume growth patterns

   • Progression through usage tiers

   • Expansion into new use cases or features

4. Win Rates by Market Segment

   • Win rates in key verticals (e.g., conversational intelligence, media & entertainment, creator tools, etc)

   • Win/loss patterns by company size

   • Competitive win rates in specific use cases

The reason we focus so heavily on these journey metrics is that they directly reflect the effectiveness of our product marketing efforts. For example ,if we see rapid adoption of new features, it validates our launch messaging and technical content.

What's particularly powerful about these metrics is that they serve as leading indicators for business growth. Strong developer journey metrics typically translate to higher retention and expansion rates down the line.

Without any context about the business, product, market, or customer, these 3 metrics are generally solid ways to measure your product marketing efforts.

1. Conversion rates - Is your message differentiated and resonating with website visitors within your ICP?

2. Win rates - Is your sales team effective at highlighting differentiation and connecting to business outcomes to beat the competition or status quo?

3. Product adoption - Are you reaching customers at the right time with a compelling message that drives them to consider and use more of your product suite?