Summary

Lisa Zane outlines a context-driven approach for product managers to evaluate whether their product is on track for success, emphasizing the importance of understanding unique business and product goals, the product's purpose, current progress, potential blockers, and selecting appropriate Product Health Metrics.

Abstract

In her recent cohort of the 0 to 1 Group Coaching Program, Lisa Zane addressed the common concern among product managers about the trajectory of their products' success. Instead of adhering to a one-size-fits-all set of metrics, Zane suggests a tailored approach that begins with defining what success means for both the business and the product team. She emphasizes the importance of aligning the product's purpose with user needs and ensuring the team believes in the solution. Zane advocates for a thorough understanding of the product's current stage and the learning that has occurred through various forms of testing. She also references Marty Cagan's Four Big Risks, encouraging product teams to proactively identify and address potential blockers. Ultimately, Zane guides product managers to choose the right Product Health Metrics by asking critical questions about why, what, and how to measure, ensuring that the metrics chosen are the most impactful for their specific context.

Opinions

Success metrics should be highly tailored to the unique context of the business and product.
It's crucial to have a clear understanding of the product's purpose and to ensure it aligns with solving a real problem for the users.
The product team must believe in the product and its ability to solve the identified problem effectively.
Product managers should assess the product's development stage and the insights gained from user research, prototype testing, and other forms of validation.
Addressing the Four Big Risks (Value, Viability, Usability, Feasibility) is essential for anticipating and overcoming potential product development challenges.
Selecting Product Health Metrics should be a thoughtful process, driven by the specific needs and goals of the product and business, rather than a standardized approach.
Continuous learning and adaptation are key to understanding what "on track" means for a product at any given time.

How do I know if the product I’m working on is on track to do well?

An approach to ensure your efforts are going into measuring the things that matter most based on YOUR unique context.

In my recent cohort of my 0 to 1 Group Coaching Program for product managers who are the PM #1 at their respective startups, several iterations of the following question were asked:

“How do I know if the product I’m working on is on track to do well?”

There are many different schools of thought on how to answer this. Most start with the end first and focus on the top metrics that great product teams track.

While there are certainly trends and areas of overlap when it comes to key performance indicators and what teams should be tracking, I’m going to flip this on its head and “product-manager-ize” the actual process I would go through to answer this question — start with more questions and make sure the things you’re putting effort into measuring are the things that matter the most based on your unique context.

Here are the 5 steps I would go through:

1) What does “do well” mean to the business and to the product team?

What does it mean to do well now? What will it mean in the future? Could this change? Think really critically about this. What goals are important to define this? Can progress towards these goals be tracked? Understanding and being aligned on this is crucial.

2) What is the WHY behind the product and does it make sense?

Is it solving the problem well for the particular users who have this problem? Does the team believe in it? Do I believe in it? How well is it solving this problem? If our why still isn’t clear, or if our problem isn’t clearly defined, or if we don’t understand who our users are, we should start there first.

3) What has been done so far to understand what “on track” even looks like?

What stage is the product at right now? Are we still in an early concept phase? Have we got significant user research to validate that our idea is good to begin with? Have we done any low fidelity prototype testing to assess the feasibility and impact of our solution? Have we done Internal Dogfooding, Alpha, and Beta testing? What “doing” has been done to get to a place where the team has learned enough to define what “on track” means accurately, given our context?

4) Are there any blockers?

Marty Cagan has a great article on this — The Four Big Risks — that was published 5 years ago now but still rings true. The four types of risks when endeavouring to build and launch a new product that Cagan calls out are:

Value: Whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it
Viability: Whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business
Usability: Whether users can figure out how to use it
Feasibility: Whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have

Are any of these things blocking the team right now? Or, will they be likely to be blockers in the future? How many of these things are known vs. unknown? What can we do to better understand the unknowns?

5) How can we choose the right Product Health Metrics to monitor (pre- and post-launch)?

Here’s where everything comes together.

With the above context, rather than starting with a metrics-first approach, I would start by asking questions to really understand WHY we want to measure something, WHAT we want to measure specifically, and HOW we can do that with some sample metrics.

Some examples:

The takeaway: Start with asking the right questions both to understand context, and to make better decisions about the best ROI for the effort that you and your team put in to measuring anything instead of starting with a long list of metrics you’re going to measure.

There are tons of resources available for further upskilling in this area and gleaning insights from different perspectives. I’m a big fan of Shreyas Doshi’s breakdown of product metrics categories and Superhuman’s strategy of reverse-engineering product-market fit as a leading indicator and working backwards from there.

How do you approach product metrics on your team or in your organization? I would love to hear your thoughts — drop a comment below or connect with me on Twitter👇

-Lisa ✨

Follow me on Twitter: @lisazane15

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