Revisit the strategic goals for the product and create consensus on concrete success metrics.
Product Launch Metrics
With your product about to hit the market, everyone will be dying to know how it performs. You need to get the whole organization on the same page about what matters. Revisit the strategic goals for the product that were proposed before and during the product launch kickoff, and create consensus on concrete success metrics.
Sales, revenue, new users, page views, and adoption make a sizable metric pool. However, many metrics are entirely irrelevant if they don’t align with the organization’s KPIs. There are many dangers in using such vanity metrics to taint the lens of viewing your product, so don’t fall prey to this. Metrics that answer questions about the overall product strategy should always be the focus.
Beyond purely figuring out if you’re achieving your goals, you’ll also want to establish additional measures to track early on. Develop your plan for what key metrics to track that is most important for your team.
Identify Product KPIs
Identify those product KPIs and automate data collection and reporting. These include the red flags to watch out for (such as high churn and abandonment) and positive trends (such as repeat users and conversions from trials to paying customers).
You’ll want to regularly check these figures, so make sure it’s not an overly manual process to get your hands on them. By tracking this data right away weekly or on a schedule you’ve predetermined, you’ll be able to spot hiccups early on. You can then intervene before problems fester and damage the momentum of your launch.
Over time you may need to augment the KPIs you looked at on day one as you learn more about what moves the needle and matters most.
Acknowledging that you don’t know what you don’t know and having a plan means you won’t be obsessing over vanity metrics that are no longer relevant to the product or company’s success.
