What metric to measure product managers?


2

We're building a recruiting and employee management platform (similar to Yammer).

The product records and analyzes metrics for each different type of employee so that we can offer employers of large organizations an overhead view of how their team is doing.

What metrics would you say are important to track for product managers?

Metrics that we could use to decide how productive a product manager is or how important their contributions have been to the team.

Employees Metrics Saas Product Management

asked Apr 11 '14 at 10:41
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Ariel Jacobs
11 points

1 Answer


2

The most useful metric for product managers is engagement of users on the products they launch/built/maintain, number of users is secondary, and everything else isn't as good. If you only need internal metrics and company is on Agile, than you could use point value of stories PMs write that get completed, difference between points estimated and actual, size of the backlog, etc.

Ideally, Product Managers should have a P&L (revenue) responsibility for their products - a difference between projected and actual is how performance should be rated.

EDIT: Just wanted to point out that I personally wouldn't recommend using points to measure performance of any team member, just wanted to offer an option based on data easily available (not the same as most accurate). Thanks to rbwhitaker for the nudge to correct my POV.

answered Apr 11 '14 at 17:25
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Webbie
2,835 points
  • Great answer (upvoted) but I'd be nervous about using point estimates in agile as a metric. The points are intended to provide a pretty high level of abstraction, and point estimates of one team will be different from another team. If you evaluate product managers based on the total points moving through the pipeline, and especially if you tie pay raises or bonuses to it, I think you can count on product managers finding a way to get people to use larger point estimates to make it look like they're doing better, without actually getting any better results. – rbwhitaker 10 years ago
  • I couldn't agree with you more @rbwhitaker . I just figured the OP wanted some options that they could actually implement and thought they might not have access to the "good stuff". To be honest, I am not a believer in a performance management software, those types of tools are just a time sync for managers and are unlikely to paint a good picture to upper management. To quote a DBA I once worked with - "garbage in, garbage out" :-) – Webbie 10 years ago
  • @webbie Your answer seems skewed towards product managers of software products. What about non-software product managers? – Nick Stevens 10 years ago
  • Nick Stevens - engagement with a product works for media/content sites as well - readership rate (scroll down or paging), sharing via social widgets, etc. Even for a physical product something like a layaway can be considered an engagement. The bottom line is of course always sales. – Webbie 10 years ago

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Employees Metrics Saas Product Management