| Article Description: How does the CEO know whether the product manager has made the decision according to the business strategy, has obtained the actual and the result? |
How does the CEO know that the product manager's job is consistent with his own business strategy?
How do CEOs communicate business priorities to product managers?
How does the CEO know whether the product manager has made the decision according to the business strategy, has obtained the actual and the result?
Surprisingly, many companies are unable to answer these basic questions. Most companies are not short of dancing speeches and lifelike PowerPoint presentations, but few people know exactly what the product managers are doing and whether their work will help the company's business development.
So the bandwagon became the safest "innovation" ("the user will buy it as long as it is connected to the Facebook account"). It's not clear how these functions work for a company's business strategy. But it doesn't matter if this function doesn't work, there's a whole bunch of successful products to imitate.
We've all heard the old saying: "If you don't measure what you're doing, you can't improve it." In addition to measurement, the establishment of clear benchmarks and goals also plays an important role in stimulating action and results.
This is important not only for product line planning (to ensure product direction and transparency), but also for product managers and product teams.
The product scorecard is one of my favorite tools that can be used to create key performance metrics for product managers and the entire product team (key performance indicator, KPIs). We use product scorecard to make decisions and manage development progress.
Let me give you an example:
Suppose you are the Product Manager, responsible for providing solutions to the big sellers of E-commerce platforms. Business strategies vary by company, assuming that most of your company's revenue comes from these sellers, so they are the key to your business development. In this case, your product scorecard might look like this:
1. Average revenue per seller (encourage sellers to sell more goods)
2. The average sales promotion revenue of the goods on the shelves (encourage sellers to promote)
3. Absolute number of large sellers
4. NET recommended value for large sellers (NPS)--(Let the big sellers be satisfied and keep them)
After identifying key performance metrics, how do you build specific KPIs and how do they sort by priority? You should discuss the specific design of each KPI and its priorities to ensure that your understanding of the business strategy is correct, while implementing product development practices is also correct.
Product managers often complain that they have no way of controlling all the factors that affect the product, so how can they be responsible for the results? There is a point. If the product is in the maintenance period (just modifying the bug), then the product manager cannot be asked to increase the product functionality. Typically, the goal KPI is directly related to the input. If a product manager, a designer, 6 engineers, and two QA are working on a product for a whole year, you should know that the investment is expected to make a considerable return.
The Product manager has no control over all factors, which is not an excuse and is related to his field. If the product manager is too slow to increase the number of customers, he can put pressure on the marketing department to give priority to online marketing/seo. If there is no resource that can be used to make a user's document, then he needs to communicate with the designer, reduce or eliminate the need for this document, or contact a company that has the business to sign a contract with them to do the documentation.
The product scorecard can benefit us a lot, and my favorite reason is that it can filter out unnecessary functionality. If a feature is not directly related to the most important KPI for a product scorecard, you can forget about it.
Some other issues to be noted:
-Business strategies can and should be flexible and change over time. For example, our Product Manager scorecard for Sellers, as we have mentioned earlier, should adjust the KPI to reflect this if the company is more interested in playing the role of the existing seller than adding new sellers.
-the "Balanced scorecard" is similar to the product scorecard. I think it's a good idea, but it's too concrete and formal. Judging by my experience, it's too complicated for most teams. But if your company is already using it, please continue to use it, but if not, suggest a clearer, concise, measurable KPI.
-Some teams use the scorecard I say, but there are 20 or more KPIs on each product manager's list. The value of a product scorecard is to help users focus, so it's best to reduce the number of KPIs, preferably no more than five or six. A product manager can track a lot of data, but there should be several top priority goals at a time.
-Scorecards can help teams work together better. Every product manager should have a clear responsibility for the job. If the product manager has too many of the same KPIs, you may want to consider redistributing responsibilities for them.
-Each KPI should correspond directly to one or more key businesses. There should be no objection to this point. Each executive can see these KPIs and understand why they are the focus of the product project.
-It is not enough to simply create and track these KPIs. You need to keep the whole organization aware of them to ensure that everyone-marketing, sales, executives, engineers, customer service-understands why these are the focus of your work. It is sometimes necessary to adjust KPIs to accommodate the work of other departments. This situation often occurs between sales, marketing and product departments. But you have the right to decide.
Once the leader recognizes these KPIs and priorities, the product manager will be able to use the scoreboard to assess the work of the product manager when it is clear about the method of assessment and its responsibilities.
