The Hidden Levers Behind Your KPIs: A Senior Leader's Guide to What Actually Drives Performance

Leading strategic design initiatives for 25 years has revealed something unexpected: while we obsess over KPIs, the real drivers of success often hide in less obvious places. Here's what I've learned about finding and measuring these hidden levers that truly shape business performance.

As senior leaders, we constantly track KPIs that define business success - revenue growth, market share, customer acquisition costs. Yet in my work with leadership teams across industries, I've noticed that the most impactful drivers of these metrics often lie in unexpected places that traditional business analysis might miss.

This is where strategic design becomes invaluable - not as a styling exercise, but as a systematic approach to uncovering and measuring what genuinely moves the needle in your business.

I've observed this pattern more often then not: When initiatives succeed, leadership often sense the momentum before it appears in their dashboards. They notice subtle shifts in market response, in team alignment, in how quickly decisions translate to action. These aren't just soft insights - they're early indicators of changes that will eventually surface in your KPIs.

Through our work with executive teams, this observation led us to develop the Market Efficacy Index (MEI) - a tool that measures the often-overlooked elements we found consistently predicted market success. While the MEI serves our specific context, its real value lies in demonstrating how strategic design can uncover the unique factors driving your business outcomes. These are the KPIs that inform the KPIs.

For senior leaders, finding these factors requires asking different questions:

• Which patterns consistently precede your most profitable initiatives?
• What team dynamics reliably signal market momentum?
• How do your highest-performing projects differ from others from day one?
• What signals do your top performers notice before market data shifts?

In my experience, these underlying drivers are remarkably specific to each organization. A decision-making approach that accelerates market success in one company might create friction in another. The key is using strategic design methodologies to identify and measure what matters in your unique business context.

This isn't about replacing your KPIs - it's about understanding what actually drives them. Think of it as building an early warning system that predicts where your metrics will move before they shift.

Consider this common scenario: Organizations often track certain metrics simply because they're industry standard or easily measurable, rather than because they truly indicate future success. Strategic design helps break this pattern by revealing the real drivers of value creation in your specific market context.

Take time to examine your organization through this lens. Map how value flows from decision to market impact. Notice which early indicators consistently predict successful outcomes. Pay attention to what your most market-savvy teams instinctively track. As a senior leader, consider:

• When initiatives exceed targets, what was different about their approach from the start?
• Which types of cross-functional interactions consistently precede market wins?
• How do your most effective leaders gauge progress before formal metrics show change?
• What subtle signals do your best customers respond to that your dashboards might miss?

Our MEI emerged from applying this thinking to market readiness. We identified patterns in market success that traditional metrics missed - elements like differentiation potential, adoption friction, and scalability dynamics. These factors often predicted success or failure months before conventional metrics showed movement.

However, one crucial point for senior leaders: While the MEI works for our context, your organization needs its own measures. The value lies not in adopting our tool, but in using strategic design principles to uncover your specific drivers of success.

Start with one key area where you suspect current metrics might be missing important signals. Use design thinking approaches to observe patterns. Test hypotheses. Let your measurement system evolve as your understanding deepens. Most importantly, be open to discovering that initial assumptions about what drives success might need revision.

Remember, the goal isn't more metrics - it's better understanding of what truly drives success in your market context. If you're interested in our approach, explore the MEI at toddbracher.com/mei. Not because it will provide answers for your context, but because seeing how we applied strategic design to measurement might spark insights about your own key success factors.

Todd Bracher, founder of BRACHER and Betterlab, is an Industrial Designer, Design Advisor, Speaker and Author of Design in Context.

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