What are the KPIs that product marketers should be tracking for successful product launches and also growth/maintenance of product launch? What’s the best way to track and measure these KPIs, and on what cadence?

I answered a previous question about measuring success of a product post-launch, but it’s worth diving more deeply into KPIs for the launch itself. 

The most important step here is to tie your KPIs to the marketing objectives and strategies that you are adopting. For example, if you’re launching a ‘tier 3’ product without any investment in press outreach, does it make sense to track media coverage? Nope.

Let’s assume that we’re focusing on a Tier 1 product launch. Here are the KPIs I typically track:
1- Press Coverage and Analyst mentions. Important to track quantity and sentiment.
2-Social Media engagement. Also important to track quantity and sentiment, as well as both consumption (e.g. views of Tweet) and more activate engagement (e.g. Retweets). A few product launches I’ve managed led to people actively educating their followers about the product. Pure gold!
3- Visits to website/landing page
4- Engagement with the top, middle, and bottom funnel you’ve created
5- Adoption and usage of collateral from Sales team, as well as their satisfaction with enablement.

These are all leading indicators of success. Ultimately what matters most though -- and what should be tracked closely -- is long term product adoption, usage, and referral itself.

I think I eluded to some of these in the answer below on tracking the success of a product post-launch, but to summarize:

Product Launches:

• Awareness: PR mentions, organic social traffic, product page traffic, social conversations, etc.
  
• Interest: Growth in leads, MQLs, demos or key "middle of the funnel" metrics for you business.
  
• Impact: Revenue, and retention.

Growth/Maintenance: like to look at two categories here:

• Product Usage: it could be basic usage, or usage of a specific part of your app/platform, but I like to dive into a lot of these metrics after a launch.
• Revenue & Retention: How is our sales volume of the product, what is retention like?
• NPS: Are current customers happy using our product (this can help drive review campaigns, which can ultimately build more visibility)

Cadence largely depends on your sales cycle and your customers. Quarterly is likely a good start in growth/maintenance mode, unless you have a really short sales cycle. One way to help force this is doing an internal "QBR" where the PMM is responsible for producing and presenting on key growth metrics and marketing activities for that product line.

Accomplishments or goals: This is a critical A (please refer to Spark's 5A Framework or other answers) that can be very hard to figure out, but it's worth the time to build them. 

I like to think of KPIs in two buckets: 

1. New/nascent products need to drive Retention. Set up your Acccomplishments to focus on retention, and after you have that - you can push growth and start heavily investing in marketing to drive growth.

• If you aren't retaining customers, then there is no need to focus on anything else. You do not have product-market fit because people are churning from your product. 
• You're still in alpha/beta mode because you are not holding a cohort of users for longere than 7, 28, 90 days+ (yes look at it from multiple lengths of time) to help diagnose how to make the product sticky. This is why mobile games can go through months of soft launch to figure this out. 
•  Try to set up a "bare minimum" threshold of users you want to retain. Do you need 5k-10k of retained users to understant if the product is working? Make sure you've talked to product and your business teams to figure out what is a statistically significant number of users you want to hit to understand your retention curves, and whether or not you can afford to acquire them.

I know of a lot of teams who invested in growth too early, before their product was sticky and churned through a ton marketing spend and even marketing employees driving growth into a product that churned users. Don't take growth alone in a new/nascent product. Retention will be the most important thing in the beginning.  

2. Retentive products need to drive Growth. If you have retention down then your GTM strategy shifts from changing behaviors to getting more people into your product so they are in the habit-loop of retention that your existing users have.  

• This is when you know your product is sticky enough, and it's time to invest to find more users and new audiences who can use your product. 
• When you launch features in existing products, if they're large changes, you may also go back into retention mode. Ex) You launch a new user experience within a big product suite, you could take it back to be a nascent feature.  

As for cadence - after you set your accomplishments (goals), you should be checking in on them on a weekly basis in your GTM/Commercialization meetings. Once you feel like you have a set of findings and trends (I like to do this after 90 days) you can present/address them with product if they haven't learned about them already. You are constantly the source of aggregated user behavior so do not skip over these important Accomplishment/metrics is your GTM. 

I hate to say it, but it depends on the launch--for example, is this a paid new feature or included?

For a paid product/feature:

• Opportunities created
• Customer TAM (of the customers we have identified as a good fit for this, how many have an open opportunity?)
• Revenue generated

For a non-paid product/feature:

• Demand gen metrics like webinar attendees, clicks on website, etc. are helpful since it is not related to revenue

Overlap for all products/features:

• Adoption (how many customers have tried this?)
• Retention --with acqusition costs being so high, this is a critical piece! CS is a great source of insight into why retention is increasing or decreasing

As for cadence - after you set your accomplishments (goals), I recommend checking a weekly basis and sharing the numbers in GTM meetings. Once there is a set of trends (I like to look at 90 days), you can present/address them with product --assuming they arent already aware. Sometimes there are items that need to be addressed within the first month or so of launch.