1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
Stop Looking at Flat Dashboards
Stop Looking at Flat DashboardsDear Reader, Jeff Patton explained why flat backlogs don’t work for prioritizing user stories more than 16 years ago: Arranging user stories in the order you’ll build them doesn’t help me explain to others what the system does. Try handing your user story backlog to your stakeholders or users when they ask you the question “what does the system you’re building do?” I believe the same issue occurs from putting metrics on a flat dashboard: Evaluating the month-over-month changes in metrics like registrations or bookings in isolation doesn’t help teams and stakeholders understand their contribution to business goals and how their work influences leading indicators. Just as user story mapping provides context by linking User Stories to User Activities, linking metrics to a team’s output and business goals provides context for evaluating progress: Three things determine the context of a metric:
One of my biggest frustrations is the lack of context whenever I meet teams that are asked to report metrics through flat dashboards. These organizations play the reporting game rather than focusing on steering. Imagine a SaaS company tracking Signup Conversion Rate as a key engagement metric on a dashboard. 📈 The Signup Conversion Rate jumped from 5% to 8% this month. The dashboard shows a healthy trend, and leadership is thrilled—more users are completing signups as a percentage of those who start! What’s Actually Happening (Leading Indicators)🔍 Signups Started dropped from 10,000 to 5,000 (-50%). 🔍 Signups Completed dropped from 500 to 400 (-20%). Even though the conversion rate increased, the number of completed signups decreased. The improvement is misleading because it’s based on a shrinking pool of users, not better engagement. What Caused This? (Output)💡 The team added a mandatory credit card field during signup to reduce spam accounts. While this filtered out low-quality signups, it also deterred real potential users from even starting the process. Upstream Impact on North Star Metric & Business Goals 📉 North Star Metric: Active Teams Using Core Features—The number of teams actively using the product stagnates because fewer users make it through the signup and start experiencing real value. 📉 Business Goals: Expansion Revenue—With fewer teams adopting the product, there are fewer opportunities for account expansion (e.g., upgrading to higher tiers, adding more seats). Consider using contextual metrics tools like DoubleLoop or Vistaly to shift from flat dashboard to metrics views with context. Of course, OKRs traditionally also represent metrics only in a flat layout. But that’s why I’m arguing that metrics trees should be a vital input to OKR drafting: so that teams can choose and argue for metrics that matter in their context based on their relationship to upstream business goals and downstream user behaviors and Outputs. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim Gespräche über ProduktmanagementIch durfte mit meinem geschätzten Fast-Ex-Kollegen Jan Hoppe in seinem Produktkraft-Podcast einen unterhaltsamen Austausch über den sinnvollen Einsatz von Methoden führen (zur Abwechslung mal auf Deutsch).
As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
Product Practice #353 How Duolingo Approaches Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Mar 7, 2025 READING TIME 4 min & 24 sec Dear Reader, Many Product Managers were in awe of the ways of working shared in The Duolingo Handbook a few weeks ago. While it’s an inspiring read, I used this as a reason to revisit some of my all-time favorite reads about how this company operates (or at least used to operate) and extract my takeaways with you. Duolingo focuses on “Movable” Metrics...
Product Practice #352 My Digitale Leute Summit 2024 Keynote Recording and Slides READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Feb 28, 2025 READING TIME 1 min & 40 sec Dear Reader, I'm excited to share the full recording of my talk on How Product Teams Can Connect the Dots of Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery from last year's Digitale Leute Summit. You can think of it as the naturally progressing chapter (hint hint) that would follow my talk from Product at Heart 2024. As always, I won't require you, as an...
Product Practice #351 The Post-it trap: Why Strategy needs more than Workshops READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Feb 21, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 19 sec Dear Reader, 'Product Strategy by Post-it' occurs when teams prioritize filling out frameworks over making real strategic choices. It's a common symptom of treating strategy as a checkbox exercise rather than a tool for decision-making. John Cutler even suggests that most frameworks should feature a warning label like this: "This framework is...