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📈 Metrics

How do successful product managers define metrics and goals?

“Goals help connect your mission to your strategy, roadmaps, initiatives and tactics by tying the single metric you care about most with a target and a time frame during which it can be achieved.”

🎯 Defining the right metric

Take a moment to think about the single most important metric to the success of your business. This should be the north star that you can rally your team around and driven by the vision of your product and mission of your company.

Some sample metrics based on different types of companies:

• Social media - daily active users and retention

• Payments - transaction volume

• E-commerce - gross merchandise volume or profit 

The DO’s:

• Pick the most simple measurable metric you can move

• Ties closely with the usage of your product

• Change the metric, when needed - your business could evolve

The DONT’s:

• Have too many metrics you are tracking - it can pull attention from critical items

• Vanity and non-actionable metrics

• Ratios as metrics

🥅 Setting goals using metrics

Goals can unify your team and hold your team accountable.

Guidance on picking goals:

• Goals should have an end date

• There should be short term and long term goals the company is working towards

• Set two types of goals; 80-20 and 50-50

  • 80-20 are goals you’re confident (80%) of achieving and 50-50 are goals that are a shot in the dark (50%) 

• Goals should be specific and measurable 

• Picking goals are part science part art

🤔 Takeaways

1. Find a single top-line metric that is easy to measure and is directly correlated with the success of your product and business

2. Create short term and long term goals to help guide your product and company 

3. Have attainable and stretch goals 

📌 Link to the full article by the Data Science team at Sequoia Capital

End Note

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Have a great day,

Nick