Enabling product teams to improve using KPIs

When a company sets goals for their teams, they have multiple ways of doing it.

A lot of companies set what I call Execution Goals.

Execution Goals are goals tied to adding new features or improving existing features.

They’re usually planned using a product roadmap.

The problem with Execution Goals is that it removes all decision making from the product teams on the “what” to do.

Which reduces ownership for the product teams.

An alternative is having KPI Goals.

KPI Goals are goals the company sets a metric the product team needs to improve upon.

Examples of KPI Goals in an e-commerce site:

• The checkout team has the goal to reduce churn between checkout steps by 5%
• The operations team has the goal to improve site load times by 15%
• The product listing team has the goal increase user click through to the product details page by 4% in the fishing rod category.

KPI Goals moves the decision making to the product team.

Which allows them to become experts within their domains.

By giving them access to dashboards of team and company wide KPIs, you enable them to improve.

– Samy