Product Goals and Metrics: Part 4

Defining goal for your product or OKRs

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

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

The first step is lay out the context we have built over Part 1, 2 and 3, that will help us develop goals.

• We know the product is an online search engine on a retailer site. The company has been around for a long time and the product has been around for a couple of years.
• We have defined our vision as “be the easiest and most helpful way for customers to find products”
• We know the metrics we care about include “percent of sessions who 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. This is an important point as depending on the company and the product, you would need to bench-mark your product accurately. If you are aiming to be the best in the market and become the leader in the space, you must not let competitor numbers impact your goal setting processes. If you can be 10x better than anyone out there, you might build a long lasting business and product.

Let’s assume one of our goals for the year would be to “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.

The above gives you an idea of a key objective and key results attached to it. In the last and final Part, we will talk about setting multiple objectives, tracking them, and using them to build excitement for the product and improving the quality of our work. Thank you again for reading.