OKRs for Product Adoption and Launches
Across the web, product marketers are united on one thing - product marketing OKRs can be tricky to define (and track).
Nevertheless, OKRs are extremely important. It’s difficult to communicate your value when you don’t have specific metrics to measure your success. Today’s post is based on Clare Hegg’s presentation, “Product Marketing Metrics and Measurement. Oh my!” and the OKR module from PMA’s Product Marketing Core course.
The metrics you track depend on your business goals and what you’re trying to achieve. Today we’re focused on product launches and product adoption.
First…back to basics
Before you visualise complex methods, spreadsheets and graphs -let’s outline the points you need to keep in mind while mapping out your OKRs
1. Work backwards: What are your broader company goals and what are you trying to achieve? Figure where you’re going in terms of the broader goals and what you need to do as a product marketer to get your company there. If the goal is a product launch- what counts as a successful launch and what is your role in guaranteeing this success?
2. Work SMART: One thing I’m sure we’re tired of hearing about? SMART goals. But if you’re going to have goals that matter, the smart framework is an important yardstick to evaluate your goals by.
3. Steer clear of vanity metrics: Likes and pageviews may be nice to look at but don’t actually give you any real information on how people are interacting with the product itself.
Bryony Pearce gives this great example in the PMA Core course of how deceptive vanity metrics can be:
If 7000 people land on your product page- 2% click the call to action and 0.1% sign up for a product demo- focusing on the 7000 that landed on the product page can put you in a lot of trouble because that has no direct business impact.
Product Adoption OKRs
Here are examples of product adoption metrics you can track
Active Users
User Satisfaction
Feature Adoption
Up and Cross-sell revenue
Time taken to complete actions
Active Users
Start by defining what the word active means for your product.
How often does a user need to perform certain actions before being classified as active? Daily, weekly, monthly?
What action needs to be performed to be classified as active?
When you’ve figured out what active user means for you, check these stats daily. I’ve listed tools specifically for tracking product adoption at the bottom of this article but know that you can use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Tableau or a dashboard created by your team to check app analytics on the backend.
To track active users, match the percentage of total users with active users before your campaign and a couple of weeks after your campaign to see the impact on the numbers.
User Satisfaction
User satisfaction is broad in the sense that a user can be dissatisfied with almost any aspect of the product and there are so many things to track. The key is to find out which parts of the product adoption process are directly affected/linked to you as a product marketer and track that. Track the parts of the adoption process that are within your control.
For example, if you own the onboarding process, you can ask your customers to rate the onboarding process on a scale of 1- 10 or ask them how the onboarding process can be improved.
You can then implement their feedback and then do the same test/ask the same questions after implementation. The goal is to get a positive change in scores.
Feature Adoption
Define your success criteria for feature adoption. Feature adoption definitely doesn’t mean using a feature once.
If users aren’t using a specific feature, I’d recommend doing a survey to find out why first before going on with an adoption campaign.
Take a look at the date before the campaign and then weeks after to see if your success criteria for adoption were met.
Up and cross-sell revenue
An increase in up and cross-sell revenue is a great way to track product adoption. Being able to upsell and cross-sell your customers means they love you so much that they want to go further.
Dissatisfied customers don’t buy more and being the voice of the customer, product marketers are critical in ensuring satisfaction. Keeping a finger on the pulse of your customer is key so you’re the first person to sense dissatisfaction and put the team on track to course-correct before you lose the customer completely.
Sharing percentages of cross-sell and upsell revenue across the relevant teams keeps everyone accountable and product marketing should be no exception. Speak to the relevant stakeholders about claiming a percentage of total revenue.
Time taken to complete actions
This is another great way to check product adoption. If users are taking longer than normal to complete an action, the first step is to find out why- do this by asking your customers. If it’s something a campaign can fix, creating in-app walkthroughs, how-to videos or hopping on demo calls are great.
Be sure to measure time taken before and after the campaign efforts so you can see if they’ve had any effects.
Product Launches
How do you measure the success of a product launch? The success of a launch sits more on the process before the launch. As a product marketer, you’ll need to ensure all the departments are working in sync to launch on the due date. You’ll also have to map out what constitutes a great launch for your company. I like to break my launch metrics down into 3 parts:
- Product - Track the feature or product development before the launch date so it’s ready on schedule. This is the most important part of the process.
- Company - Are all the important stakeholders aware of their responsibilities leading up to the launch and are they on track to meet them? Is sales ready to sell the product? How can you help them through sales enablement? Do you need to run an education campaign so all relevant company members are aware of the new product/feature and are confident enough to talk about it?
- Customers - Track the numbers to see if users performed the relevant CTAs and are interacting with the product as intended.
For tracking the process leading up to product launches, Clare Hegg is a fan of good old spreadsheets and slides.
She advocates for breaking the product launch into the smallest parts and then doing weekly status checks to ensure the team is on track.
Tools for tracking product adoption
Here are a couple of tools you can use to track product adoption including some of the other metrics mentioned in the article:
Have any comments or feedback? You can send me a message on LinkedIn.
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