Product Goals and Metrics: Part 4

Topic: Defining goals or OKRs for your product

In Part 1, 2 and 3, we have covered the following topics:

• defining a clear vision for your product
• defining key customer outcomes and corresponding “external” metrics
• defining “internal” metrics that move “external” metrics and achieve the customer outcomes

In Part 4, we will start to define goals for our product. There are several ways to set goals and a lot of them include defining clear measurable outcomes or objectives and connecting them to secondary outcomes or results. I will use the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) methodology below to define goals for our product in consideration. You can find more readings on OKRs here.

Let me lay the context we have built in Part 1, 2 and 3:

• We know the product we are talking about is an online products search engine. It is owned by a retail company that has been around for a while
• We have defined our vision as “be the easiest and most helpful way for customers to find products”
• The metrics we care about include “percent of site or app sessions which use the search engine”, “percent of search queries that lead to a click on the first search result”, and “percent of search sessions that lead to a search result added to cart”

So, which of the outcomes or metrics do we select for our goal for the next six months? Should we get more site visitors to use the search engine or should we make more people click on the first search result? It is a common and good practice to have a few outcomes as goals for a quarter or year. Let’s assume the clicks metric has seen slow growth in the last few years and it is still pretty low compared to competition. Let’s assume one of our goals for the year is “Improve the percent of search queries that lead to a click on the first search result by 20% by end of second quarter”. We assume in the last few quarters, this number has risen by a few percent points only and we want to raise the bar this time. So, this becomes one of your key objectives for the quarter. But, how will we achieve this? For that, you need to set a few key results or “secondary” goals. This might include:

• Improve page load time by 50% by week 6 of the quarter
• Improve search query understanding accuracy by 25% by week 8 of the quarter
• Improve the matching and ranking algorithms to account for customer preferences by week 10 of the quarter

The above results together should help improve the percent of queries leading to clicks on the first search result. The assumption is if we make search faster, understand the user intent better, and use more intelligence to match and rank the best products, they are more likely to find the top search result on search very useful.

Hopefully, the short story gives you an idea of a key objective and key results attached to it. This will mark an end to my posts on setting goals and objectives. Thank you for reading.