Picking metrics that _really_ matter

The Olympics are still rolling out, and there has been a small debate around how to measure the best nation: should you count the country having the most medals, or the country having the most gold medals.

As of writing this, the USA are dominating both categories (the French in me struggled to write that), so the point is now moot. BUT, it’s still a relevant conversation as it can be applied to many goal setting problems.

Getting the most things vs. getting the best things

What’s great about goal-setting frameworks like OKRs is that they’re amazing at focusing people on a specific set of goals. But, what’s not so great about said frameworks is that if the goals are bad, then a lot of effort is going to be wasted.

Think of it as aiming at a target far away. There’s nothing that you can do to correct the course once the arrow leaves the bow. OKRs aren’t as bad (you can refine things with weekly check-ins), but it’s still critical to get the aim right – especially if you have a limited amount of arrows to shoot at your target.

Rather than keeping on using metaphors, I can tell you something that happened to us recently.

When getting the most distracts you from getting the best

We obviously want to get more and more people to use Tability. And, in order to drive that effort we’ve been keeping things simple by tracking the number of people that sign up every week.

Every business has an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and we have ways to qualify our leads via automations and a set of questions (team size, role, etc). But, while we knew fairly well who would benefit the most from Tability, we did not feel the need to refine our leads tracking initially as we were getting a balanced set of companies:

• Some small teams keen to build with great discipline around goals
• Many SMBs and large teams (our ICPs) wanting to get alignment and visibility on progress
• Some Enterprise customers in need of flexibility and ease-of-use to empower their teams.

So, I set ourselves a goal to grow the number of signups/week and the bad assumption I made was that we’d keep our ICP ratio.

But a quick retrospective highlighted two big issues with that approach:

1. We started to focus more on short-term wins to boost sign ups, instead of investing in strategic efforts
2. We muddled our message to please more people instead of focusing on the right persona for our platform

The right metrics will boost your success.

The wrong metrics can kill your business.

We generally want to get the most of everything (the most customers, the most revenue, the most reviews…) but just aiming for the most can lead to destructive behaviors. In our case, we managed to catch that problem thanks to the weekly check-ins process that we have in place, and thanks to having amazing people on the team that keep us honest.

We take advantage of our weekly OKR progress review meeting to dig deep and have tough conversations. In turn, this helps us refine our strategy and quickly adjust our effort.

Be clear about what’s good for you

We’ve since refined our goals to make sure that they’ll drive the right incentives. Rather than attempting to get the most number of signups, we’re now focusing on the best quality of signups (while still having a minimum target in mind).

As you read this post, this all might sound obvious to you (what, they did not focus on their ICP?). But, the devil is in the execution.

Ex: we rolled a new homepage that we thought had a much clearer message for our ideal customer. We put it in an A/B test thinking it'd be a home run.

The result: it was 26% worse than the existing message. What a let down.

Our knee jerk reaction was to revert and go back to the previous copy. But, was it really a failure? Or was it that now we had a clearer value proposition which helped weed out the low quality signups? (those who just want to see what your product is about).

At the end we decided to stick with the new message. It was much clearer for the people who had the problems we were solving and we're now booking more demos and calls while getting fewer overall signups.

When less is more

The transition phase is the hardest.

Some of your metrics will collapse while you’re refining your approach to do what’s best for your business. But, what’s important is to be able to recognise a real signal from what was previously noise (or a vanity metric).

My last advice before leaving: let your OKRs drive tough conversations.

Make sure it’s not just a quick checkpoint at the end of each month. And don't hesitate to review your KPIs/key results if you feel like something is not right.

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Get Tability if you want a platform that will both surface issues with your strategy, and make it super easy to have conversations around your goals.