What metrics can be used to measure the performance of the Product Management team in your company?

I would separate measuring performance of teams from measuring performance of individual team members. Metrics are a part of the process, but I would suggest using metrics-based goals instead to judge performance. Goals vs. metrics. The team leader should assign goals to individual team members. Some might be launch goals (e.g. "Launch feature X in the US by July 31.") and some might be metric-based (e.g. "Increase trial-to-active user conversion from 8.5% for FY 2010 to 10.2% for FY 2011, an increase of 170bps."). The team leader should aggregate some of these and/or pick a subset and surface them higher in the organization as team goals. Metric/goal setting is a skill. Stronger product managers will do a better job picking the right metrics to measure what they do, forecasting both baseline (organic growth) and individual project impact, negotiating (based on data) over what an appropriately challenging goal is, and then hitting their numbers. the act of simply getting to a stated goal demonstrates a data-driven competency. Teams have leaders. The leader's performance should be judged based on the achievement of the team's overall goals because the leader sets expectations about the team's deliveries, builds the team, manages the team, and coaches or fires poor performers. Setting expectations is an incredibly important part of the leader's role. Poorly set expectations can make a great team look terrible. Some of my biggest failings as a leader in recent years have been in failing to appropriately set or manage the expectations of execs in my company. Judging individual performance. Judge individuals not only by whether they met their goals or not, but also by how aggressive the goals are and how well they managed their product throughout the goal period. Product management competencies. In addition to the explicitly set goals, judge individual product managers based on how well they demonstrated various PM competencies. Some examples include: setting and meeting expectations of all types, bias for action (not waiting to be asked), precision question & answering, quality of written documentation (not only specs), customer focus, etc.

For PM performance, measure how well you have achieved 'goals' that are related to your product's vision and current roadmap. Of course, this is heavily dependent on the product you're working on. Some examples of 'goals' could include: Increase revenue by 10% Increase feature X adoption by 500% Improve customer satisfaction survey to 9/10, and, so on. The interesting thing here is that most goals are fairly abstracted from your product. That's a good thing. You want to find the best solutions to solve these 'goals' or 'customer problems'. That's the product manager(s) job. To do so, we need to dig a level deeper into the metrics scale, we need to measure how we achieve these ambitious goals. Welcome to... Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)a.k.a. Google's Secret Sauce. Are OKRs for me?Yes! Well, if you want to lead a team that's: autonomous focuses on achieving goals (rather than pre-determined solutions) gets more done Now that I've used them, unless I was working with people I didn't trust, I wouldn't go back. A pretty cool side effect is that OKRs help enable distributed teams (+1 if that's you). What's the point of hiring people, if you feel you have to micromanage them? There's no point. Zero. Nada. None. So... what are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR?They help teams define & track outcomes, and there's two parts: Objectives =>the "goal", generally subjective/qualitative Key results => concrete, specific, and measurable, describing how you'll achieve a related objective. So the way it works is that: first, you create a bunch of objectives (these could come from and/or align to the company/team you work in) then, you create a number of key results that will help achieve the objective. The important part is that you use actual metrics to measure how much of a key result you achieved (e.g. I scored 9/10 on key result X, Y and Z). Google's rule of thumb is to set ambitious key results, where 7 is the norm to be achieved. In terms of frequently, set them quarterly and annually. Here's an example: Where did OKRs start & who uses them?In the 1970s at Intel, and is now used at: Google LinkedIn Twitter Zynga How can I use OKRs in my PM team?Like it was mentioned above, find the product's/company's high level goals, and now set these as objectives. Individual PMs along with their mangers can then set Key Results that look to achieve the objects. Example PM OKRsObjective: Increase blog readership Key results: Re-engineer blog to increase avg. page speed to 100 milliseconds Create a weekly blogging/content schedule Regularly participate in Twitter/niche community product forums Speak at 3 product events and create slide decks for each An OKR template, for free.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHpQOvZz76_10ebJP2AKvvXUF3H9yd6FC89F5jS4mks/edit?pli=1 If OKRs still don't make sense, take a read of this post onhttps://medium.com/startup-tools/okrs-5afdc298bc28#.t6yld4s76. In fact, just read it anyways. Oh, and don't forget, make all of this transparent!

None.  Answer below pasted from a similar question on engineering - You need a strong performance review system which incorporates thorough peer review.  The foundation will be regular 1-1's with each of your folks where you give and get feedback and discuss progress against goals and objectives. This will yield almost entirely qualitative, subjective judgements, which is as it should be.   Trying to devise quantitative metrics that somehow make the process more objective and fair often have the opposite effect. You need to know, and your team will know, who is a great team member and who isn't.

See my long post on this, http://www.mironov.com/metrics/ .  Summarizing: - we typically confuse metrics about products with metrics about product managers - PMs cover the gaps between processes and organizations.  If we put in rigorous metrics for PMs, we encourage them to ignore the soft (i.e. critically important) parts of their role in favor of scoring points.  ("Longer MRDs are better, so...") - important PM skills are hard to quantify but easy to see, especially reflected in the attitudes of our partner organizations - Great PMs are problem solvers, not bookkeepers. BTW, product metrics still requires us to apply our investigative skills to find why things happen. Also see the PM organizational assessment tool linked from http://www.mironov.com/metrics/ .

I don't think you can define a metric for successful Product Management because it is such a multi-disciplinary position.  You could argue sales success, but what if the Sales Team (not under the PM's influence) isn't doing a good job?  You could argue support call volume, but what if the Helpdesk didn't learn the product enough to support it well or the Engineers didn't develop it to spec and quality?   And if nobody knows about the product, how can it make any money (marketing)? That said, I think the biggest thing for evaluating a PM should be if the product is competitive or not.  And IF NOT, has the PM identified why and do they have a plan for getting the product competitive?   Is there a roadmap that your Executives buy into to solve the problem?  If they aren't solving the problems, they aren't doing their job. Everything else is under the silos of so many other departments or management that you can't truly hold the PM accountable.  One bad development team, one bad support group, one bad sales team, one terrible marketing strategy and it will all affect the product's success. That said, the PM should have a STAKE in all of the above departments.  Their influence should be felt in each area, but they don't have total authority on those groups so they could be doing a great job for your company internally and you're still not getting traction because of those other teams.

A few weeks back we published a post about some http://www.prodpad.com/2015/08/3-important-metrics-saas-product-managers/ product managers could use to track their success. This question coincidentally aligns quite nicely!Aside from the metrics they’re already keeping track of for themselves, as well as KPI’s and company OKR’s, we’ve come up with a few more questions to ask (and where to find the answers).Are they moving the roadmap forward?At the very least, your company should have an internal public roadmap. While we know this isn’t a product manager’s http://www.prodpad.com/2015/08/product-management-just-roadmap/, items on the list should be updated and moved around as priorities change and evolve through time. If items aren’t moving, it’s time to have a chat. Are they leading their peers?A product manager’s most important skill is their ability to lead. The best way to evaluate that is to speak to other team members. Do they feel like they’re they being heard? Is their feedback being considered? This isn’t a popularity content. Every company’s PM may not always be most likeable person in the team (their job is to sometimes say “no”… a lot!) but they should still be empowering their team to share and comment on upcoming features and ideas.A product manager does get the final word on product decisions, but that also means their team members should feel comfortable enough to approach them with their ideas. Everyone from sales to marketing to support should understand the product’s vision, and still feel like they’re being considered. It takes these interpersonal skills for your PM to successfully lead their product’s development.Are they challenging product requests?Is your PM showing the right analytical skills? Your product manager should challenge you and say ‘no’ once in a while – yes, even to you! Your PM can’t be a pushover. It’s not a good sign if they accept requests without raising an eyebrow first. At the end of the day, a PM who fires back critical questions is facilitating the kind of valuable discussions that prevent shaky or otherwise questionable ideas from moving forward.Are they shipping?This one may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s true. Has your product manager actually shipped anything at all? If your team continues to be stuck in the same ideation stage without successfully delivering anything, then the product manager might not be communicating or leading effectively. Of course, a great product manager must have an equally great product management tool – so make sure they’re using http://www.prodpad.com/!

Product Managers should be held accountable to metrics that are meaningful to the business.  In a SaaS company, that's almost always something like-> - Leads - Close Ratio (funnel efficiency) - Sales (Units/Signups, Revenue) - some kind of Y/Y health/growth metric for existing customers that makes sense for you- Attrition the key part is to look for forward-looking metrics that will predict success instead of looking in the rear-view mirror.  This will almost always be unique to your business and based on some kind of user activity. It goes like this... What's your business goal.  What are your users excited by. You need to brainstorm and plan like crazy in this area. But how do you know if it's working?  You need to have a sense of the metrics.  They don't lie.  If your competitor has double your signups, there is a reason for that.  You do not manage to metrics.  Metrics are warning signs. If you didn't already know there was a problem, then everyone else does now.  Pay attention and brainstorm, implement, ship and track over time. Don't kill yourself though.  Obsess about your users and make long-term decisions.

Ultimate success of the product that is released - so its a weighted avg of sales, marketing, engineering success - Product mgmt's role should be the GM of a product - so how you were able to influence/coerce/beg engineering to produce an awesome product and have it be in line with the marketing message and have it sell like hotcakes.

Having read a number of the answers here I believe the reason why the majority of answers are guidelines instead of metrics is because there's no one size fits all, it very much depends on the product itself. While I agree with that, I also thinks it's best to give some direct answers to atleast out you on the right path. Product management is (unsurprisingly) all about creating great products. Great products are engaging and useful. Therefore, if you can measure the number of times people are achieving the point behind the product that should be your ideal metric, however monthly engaged users or similar can be a good indication albeit one step removed. Consider using both. Oh and as you may be thinking it, yes the number of users will be affected by the performance by sales and marketing, just like their numbers are affected by how good the product is. Some examples: Spotify - # songs played per active account Quora - # questions asked, answers provided and/or upvotes Uber - % searches leading to a booking After deciding on the metric itself remember that it's not the number spat out each week you're interested in, instead focus on the change and trends accounting for seasonal volatility. Good luck!