A Product Manager’s Overview of KPIs

KPIs are a powerful tool for any Product Manager. They provide powerful data insights into team performance, product success, business progress, and also act as a strong defensive tool when making and justifying decisions. Without KPIs, Product Managers are left blind to what is going on and are unable to make truly informed decisions on the future of the product.

Here is a very brief overview of some of the most important KPIs and why they are important within Product Management.

Categories of Product KPIs

Product KPIs can be split into different categories; business performance, product development, product usage, and product quality. Selecting the right KPIs for reporting is crucial to building credibility, encouraging engagement, celebrating successes, monitoring progress, and identifying trends or issues to troubleshoot them quickly. If you have the right KPIs to hand they should give you confidence in your progress, attainability of goals, and your decision making.

Here is an overview of some key business performance KPIs within each category.

Business Performance KPIs

• Revenue
• Deals / Bookings / Registrations
• Funnel
• Retention / Attrition / Churn
• Customer counts
• Velocity / time to revenue
• Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
• Market Position / Third-party rating

Product Usage KPIs

• Monthly users
• Users per feature
• Time to download

Product Development KPIs

• Delivery to deadline (per release)

• Resource availability

Product Quality

• Support and ticket escalation
• Testing

Business Performance KPIs should be used as an indicator as to how effective customer service, the overall sales funnel, and customer success engagements are working. For example, if customer churn and attrition are increasing, it means there is an issue pushing people to leave, and it’s imperative to address this as soon as possible. On the other hand, increasing bookings and registrations that show significant growth can open the door to conversations around further investment and product diversification.

Product Usage KPIs can be used to understand how a product is used. These are helpful in making decisions around which feature releases and improvements to prioritise, and to track user behaviour over a period of time to identify potential customers that might churn based performance issues. Monitoring these KPIs allow Product Managers to identify and tackle issues early before they become escalated issues, therefore proving the best possible customer experience.

Product Development KPIs help create a base for celebrating achievements and identifying areas for improvement including velocity and speed of development within Product teams, which helps to keep the overall product journey on track, and the team motivated and driven.
Finally, Product Quality KPIs will help you validate the overall quality of your organisation and your product, enabling and empowering continuous improvement, reduced testing, automation, and better customer experience, thus reducing attrition and churn, and increasing growth and higher revenues.

KPIs for Driving Product Success

Product Managers rely on KPIs to drive their teams and deliver great products that customers need and want, on time. Without these data insights Product Managers would be unable to make the informed decisions required for a smooth, effective product delivery, resulting in longer delivery times and more mistakes.

These data insights can also be used to help drive team performance, by highlighting any key areas for improvement and also celebrate any team wins, achievements, and successes. A motivated and driven team is key to overall product success.
Knowledge is power, and the ability to set and monitor KPIs effectively can make or break a company.

Hire the Right Product Talent in Berlin

Are you looking for exceptional Product talent to help drive your KPIs and improve your Product delivery?

Maxwell Bond are the leading specialist Product Recruitment Agency, with proven results hiring professionals across all levels including Product Owners, Product Managers, Heads of Product, CPO’s and more across Berlin. For support identifying, attracting, and hiring the top Product talent, reach out directly for a confidential chat on how we can help you scale and grow a high performing Product division.

Alternatively, if you’re searching for your next Product role in Berlin, browse our current vacancies online.