There’s a lot of content out there about metrics – OKRs, KPIs, AARRR, LTV, ARPU etc etc. There’s even some thoughts on this very blog about metrics (Metrics, Means and Maps, Cogitating on ROAS, It’s Good that Data is Man Made).
When product folks talk about measuring our team’s success, we always talk about the success of the things we build. Ideally the customer- or business-level outcomes that we want to achieve.
“This quarter we’ve prioritized reducing churn within the first seven days of a customer activation by at least ten percent. We can now observe that in six of our seven regions, churn has gone down by at least eight percent – we’re over halfway to our goal.”
There are still a lot of teams with the bad habit of measuring how MUCH they build – “We shipped fourteen new features this year!” – which is different than how something has impacted customers, the market, or the business. I know there are a lot of “Outcomes Over Outputs” folks, and to be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever measure output. Sometimes, in some organizations, it can be exactly what you need to do.
That’s a space to explore in a different post, I think.
It’s important – I’d even say mandatory, to measure and understand the success of the products that we build. What is missing in many cases is measuring the success of the team itself. If your product team were a product itself, how would you measure its success over time?
(Also worth mentioning, of course; teams don’t exist, but people do. )
When you’re leading a team, or building an organization, when thinking about the long term growth, you should be thinking seriously about how you’re investing in the success of the people on the team, and how to measure that over time, the same way you would for a new launch, a new product, or a new campaign.
Over a long enough time horizon, your team’s ability to accomplish those key business moving goals (decrease churn, grow customer base, improve LTV, move into a new market, etc) is downstream of this team development work. Building a strong team, and spending at least some time on how you keep that team improving over the long haul, is enormously high leverage.
Investing intentionally in the health, growth, and success of the professionals on your team also has an impact on your team’s retention, and ability to attract new talent.
These are the metrics that we use on my team – I’ll list them now, and then do a little commentary (as I do!). We’re sticking with these for 2024 (we do monthly in-team goal reviews and quarterly roundtables with our key partners) but there are some changes I think coming for next year. They’re sets of two metrics, in five themes or tenets.
2024 Team Development goals:
We Rise Together
- Run monthly Product Jam sessions
- Initiate 1x Development Opportunity per quarter (book club, speaker session, skillshare workshop, etc)
When I think about, “We Rise Together,” the “Together” is really broadly inclusive: it’s about creating opportunities for broad development and network growth within Disney. Disney has hundreds of product managers from cruises to in-park mobile apps to streaming players. Bringing folks together, to share skills and insights, and being visibly the team that is committed to doing so, generates a lot of positive visibility for the folks on the team, and makes new partnerships and internal collaboration opportunities much lower-friction.
It’s also quite fun! I personally get a lot out of a book club or tech talk; and it’s a nice forcing function to get me to actually read the new Cagan instead of scrolling Slack. Product Jam is a monthly 60-minute call where a member of the product org gives a talk or proposes a blog post or podcast to lead a discussion on. It’s quite casual but it’s a great chance to get to see folks around the org.
The tenet name is aspirational: we want to make our team better but not if it comes at the expense of our peers. It is also the first tenet on purpose: we rise but we rise together. Product is a team game, and supporting our colleagues and investing in the broader product org always bears positive dividends.
We See Far
- Schedule 1:1s with PMs outside of Media Product 2x per Quarter
- Schedule 1:1s with PMs outside of Disney Streaming 2x per Year
“Media Product” is the VP-level organization that we’re a part of. My direct lead is a Director, his direct lead is our VP. A PM outside of Media Product might work on the mobile app for Disney World, or the syndicator feeds for ABC, or the A/B testing framework for the streaming platform.
The important thing about this goal is that it helps us get out of our bubble: it’s very easy to get your nose so close to the grindstone that you lose sight of what else is happening around you. Taking some time to get to know folks outside of your direct team, as well as folks fully outside of our firm, helps to set a broader context about what’s happening in our company, as well as in the product field at large.
We See Far and We Rise Together are often contributive to one another: you have an intro 1:1 with someone, and they end up being an excellent Product Jam speaker. You get an intro to a PM working in an interesting startup from someone at book club.
We Care About Quality
- Every L-XL+ project gets a Looker Dashboard & a Retro
- Formally seek feedback from Engineering Teams Quarterly
This one is about great habits: we need to keep a pulse on how our projects perform, and how we might iterate on them in the future. To do this effectively, we have to intentionally build out the infrastructure that will fuel that awareness and iteration. The Looker piece just happens to be the tool we use – the tool is less important than getting in the habit of creating dashboards by default.
Any project sufficiently large to mandate a dashboard should also already have at least one retro scheduled by the engineering side of the house; but Product isn’t always invited to them. If it’s possible, I really like to sit in on those calls – they can often be a source of really helpful insight into process and approach, as well as feedback for how you personally are doing with a given team.
For the engineering feedback piece, we use a fairly simple Google Form, with a standard NPS metric and a few ethnographic and a few feedback questions. We schedule them in conversation with engineering leadership so we’re not asking engineers to fill out a survey in the midst of a stressful crunch time, or when lots of folks are on vacation.
There’s no perfect Product Manager, only the Product Manager that uses their product toolkit to best effect with the engineering teams they work with. Retros and quarterly surveys are a great source of insight as to how well your team is performing in that space.
Become Aware
- Each PM attends at least 1 trade show in our industry per year
- Each PM attends at least 1 Product focused event per year
This falls in much the same theme as above – a ‘trade show’ would be something like NAB in Las Vegas, a chance to connect with vendors, understand our space in the broader media and entertainment space, and walk around a gigantic trade show floor. A Product focused event would be something like Product Con or Lead Dev, maybe An Event Apart.
A theme-of-themes here is “get out of the office,” – mentally, network-wise, and literally physically. I am a firm believer that innovation emerges from novel intersections, unique combinations of experiences and expertise that are rare but valuable, and the most expedient way to achieve novel intersections is to get out there and experience a bunch of things.
Cause Awareness
- Each PM speaks 1x per year at an external event or conference
- Each PM speaks 1x per year at an internal event or conference
Becoming Aware and Causing Awareness are collaborative tenets as well – often we can check a couple boxes at a single event. I think for product folks, investing in public speaking, in clear communication, is so important, and is such a highly portable skill, even if folks I work with leave product forever (not because of me, I hope!), being clear communicators who can talk confidently in front of a room will serve them where-ever their journey takes them.
While the actual giving-a-talk is what’s being measured here, I feel that the preparation of a talk is in some ways at least as valuable as the experience of giving it. Much like blog posts, preparing a talk forces you to distill your thinking into something crisp, to take a position, and defend it to strangers.
Maybe at the end of the year I can do a roundup of how we’ve performed against these goals – and which ones we are shaking up vs. keeping as-is. It could be valuable to reflect on how setting them has been productive, or could be improved. Stay tuned!
Simon Ouderkirk 