ByMatthias Stepancich
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Product Metrics for Product Management

Product metrics can be classified in six different categories. When conceiving your metrics, consider each of these categories and pick the right metrics across them.

This Product metrics list is based on Shreyas Doshi‘s tweets.

Health Metrics

Is the product available and performing in the manner that users would reasonably expect?

Latency: The delay between a user’s action and the application’s response.
Initial load time: The time it takes for the page to appear to the user.
Uptime: How long or how reliably a system has been running.
HTTP errors: The number of requests that ended in an error for the end-user.
Data loss rate: The intentional or unintentional loss of data caused by forces within or outside an organization. This could happen through normal processes like data migration or through malicious attacks.

Usage Metrics

How are users using the product?

Time-of-day/day-of-week trends: When is traffic highest and lowest?
Top N actions: The main actions that users perform in your product.
Funnel metrics: Volume, velocity, conversion metrics related to the funnel.
Help docs usage: How users engage with help resources.
Pwd reset rate: Friction associated with pwds can reduce conversions and significantly affect business.

Adoption Metrics

Is the product (and its key features) being used as much as we’d hope, and in the ways we’d like?

Active users: The number of users engaging with the product. This is often measured as DAUs, WAUs, MAUs (Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users)
N of M day usage: A measure of how many days/weeks someone used the product (e.g. 3 out of 7 days).
Free-to-paid conversions: The number of free customers that become paid customers after a defined time period.
Strategic feature adoption trends: Answer questions like, “Which features have the lowest and highest adoption rate?”, “Which features are rarely or never used?”, “What percentage of DAUs adopted the new feature?”.

Satisfaction Metrics

What is our customers’ overall sentiment towards the product or its main features?

Overall CSAT: This is customers’ overall satisfaction with your product or service.
New feature CSAT: The customers’ satisfaction score of a newly launched feature.
Support CSAT: The customer satisfaction score for the support services offered with your product.

Ecosystem Metrics

What is the macro state of the product within the domain in which it operates?

Share of wallet: Money a customer spends on the product rather than on competing products.
Third-party integrations: They make a product more “sticky” and valuable for customers, who can qualify or disqualify products based on integrations with other applications.
Industry rank: A comparison to competitors based on factors such as estimated market value, number of customers, customer reviews, potential for growth and other factors.
Market share within target segment: The percentage of the addressable market your product has penetrated.

Outcome Metrics

What overall business results are we seeing from this product?

Revenue: Companies track how a product impacts the overall revenue.
Gross margin: The difference between total revenue and Cost of Goods Sold divided by total revenue.
Active users: Number of users who have interacted with the product within a defined time period.
% of Fortune 1000 covered: Number of Fortune 1000 companies that have adopted the product (used companies selling into large enterprises).

Refining Your Metrics

KMs

  • Define a small set of metrics (3-5) that’ll be faithful indicators of your product’s progress towards its strategy and goals. These are your KMs (Key Metrics).
  • Must be responsive to product changes.
  • Aggregate measure of the product’s value for its users.
  • Readily tied to business value.
  • Expected to be long lasting (at least 2-3 years).

LMs

  • In certain cases, KMs are lagging indicators of work done. That’s why teams also need a small set of leading indicators, LMs (Leading Metrics).
  • LMs help you understand activity, changes, experiments within a shorter time frame.
  • E.g. over the next 2-3 quarters, you might have a LM for adoption of a particular strategic feature (which over time will move your KMs), an LM for country availability, or an LM for self-serve funnel success.
  • For companies that choose KMs that are lagging indicators, define 3-5 LMs at a time. LMs can change more frequently as they measure overall product progress and business growth.

Best Practices for Tracking Metrics

  • Treat your metrics dashboard like a product.
  • Actually track its usage.
  • Set a Chrome pinned tab for the dashboard.
  • Review your pinned tab on set days (e.g. every morning, every Monday, etc.)
  • Set a weekly email report.

Related Articles