Set your KPIs

Before starting to set your KPIs, you’ll need to have your product’s:

1. Mission

2. Vision

3. User Goals

Without a fundamental grasp of what you want your product to be and how you want veterans to use it, it will be difficult to understand what metrics you will need to understand the success of your product.

We also suggest setting your product KPIs before you start building. It helps align your team around your product’s goals and what you’ll be looking for to determine if what you’re building is successful. At VA.gov, we have a few different sets of KPIs to help you measure health and success.

Definitions:

• North Star Metric (Overall Product Goal) Your leading indicator of success.

• Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) Objective The outcome the team needs to achieve to improve the user experience on VA.gov.

• Key Result The measurable (qualitative or quantitative) indicators that the team needs to meet for the objective to be true.

• Product KPIs Metrics to evaluate the overall success of your product. Use these over time to prioritize your roadmaps.

• Rollout KPIs (Secondary Metrics) Time-bound metrics that are vital to evaluate the release of your product. Use this to evaluate if you should continue releasing your product or go back to fix something. Some of these metrics may or may not be product KPIs depending on your intended outcomes and what you will need to track over time.

• Discovery Metrics (Secondary Metrics) Metrics that can be helpful to understand the background of a product or service space but may not necessarily mean success over-time.

• Performance Metrics The minimum set of standards that must always be true for your KPIs or OKRs to be successful or to enable good UX and outcomes.

How to set & prioritize your Product KPIs

At VA.gov our minimum standard for KPIs is that they are linked back to business and user metrics. We also suggest that you have a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data helps with accuracy for your analysis, and qualitative data helps give you context.

You can find the KPI Framework and KPI Setting Workshop in Mural. Platform Analytics & Insights uses these frameworks to set up out of the box KPI dashboards to make it easier to set and track your KPIs.

We strongly recommend using analytics from multiple sources to provide a more holistic view of your product’s health and success.

Platform resource links:

• KPI Setting Framework

• KPI Setting Workshop

  1. Mural Board

  2. Mural Template

External resource links:

• Amplitude - The North Star Playbook

• Perdoo - The ultimate guide to OKR

• Toptal - Creating success - A guide to product manager KPIs

• Amplitude - How to set metrics for product launches

• Perdoo - OKR vs. KPI: How they compare and work together

• Occam’s Razor - You are what you measure, so choose your KPIs (Incentives) wisely!

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