Product Goals and Metrics: Part 1

Part 1: Defining a vision for your product

I lead the online search experience team at Walmart (we make sure millions of Walmart customers are able to find products they need easily), and we spent an enormous amount of time ensuring we are defining and focusing on the right goals and metrics for Search.

We constantly grapple with questions like, have we set the right goals? Are we chasing the right metrics? Should we pivot? I am sure a lot of product owners, developers, designers and analysts are dealing with similar problems. So, I am writing a short series of stories on how we have learnt to develop better goals. I do not believe I have all the answers, nor do I think we are DONE yet. We have made healthy progress in our goals and metrics journey and I would love to share that. In addition, I am trying to keep the series as general as possible to cover the digital and the physical world and to account for the variety and diversity of businesses we live around. I hope you enjoy the series and I am open to any feedback you have for me.

Here’s what the series will look like:

• Part 1: Defining a clear vision for your product
• Part 2: Selecting key customer outcomes and corresponding “external” metrics for the product
• Part 3: Defining “internal” metrics that help move “external” metrics and achieve the customer outcomes
• Part 4: Defining a goal or OKR for the product
• Part 5: Defining multiple OKRs and discussing tracking, benefits and trade-offs

Call out: I will use the word ‘user’ and ‘customer’ interchangeably through the series.

Before we begin, let me define the world “goal”. In the product or business context, a goal is typically an outcome a team or a product wants to achieve. The outcome should ideally help the users of the product, and if done right, should result in improving the health of business (through increase in revenue or profits or other financial metrics). Goals are often set annually or bi-annually by teams and companies but one can set them at any interval that works for you. An example of a goal could be “improve the search page load time by fifty percent” or “sell a million hiking boots by end of second quarter”. The product owners would have spent time in coming up with this goal, evaluating a variety of factors and facets about the product, company, and more.

So, how does one define strong goals for a product? Before you do that, it's good to have a product vision and a clear understanding of your business and market fit. Following are three core areas to think about:

1. A clear vision for the product or service, articulating where it is headed, is necessary. For example, the vision could look something like “be the easiest and most helpful way for customers to find products” or “build the strongest, most comfortable and durable hiking boots”. We might be one or several years away from achieving the vision but it’s important to define where we are headed. I have written another blog post on defining a vision (here) which you might find helpful.
2. It’s important to develop a deep understanding of the company and the business, the issues users face, and the existing benefits and limitations of the product in consideration. For example, if one is in the business of selling hiking boots and has a small selection, one might not need a search engine right away. On the contrary, if it is Amazon or Walmart, carrying tens of millions of products, the answer is different. This exercise helps develop user and business empathy and empowers product owners to make better decisions.
3. One must be conscious of the stage of the product itself. Is it an idea that’s about to go to market next summer? Is it a product that’s been around for a while and customers love it? Is the product matured but losing to new players? Understanding the stage of the product and it’s maturity helps think about the product positioning in the market and account for anything one has learnt from competition or observing the product’s usage.

All the above factors are important in setting goals and measurable outcomes for the product. In Part 2, we will discuss how we can use this understanding and the vision to develop clear customer outcomes for the product. This will take us another step forward in setting goals.