✴️ Importance of defining a KPI for your project:

 

KPI or key performance indicators, we often think this as a performance indicator for organization performance against its vision/goals/objective. More specifically it's financial performance, product performance, sales performance etc. But have we thought of incorporating KPI in our day-to-day work? When we are assigned a task, we tend to focus on the delivery and quality of delivery within the specified time period. But what about the performance of the team or the plan which we put in to deliver that work. How we can introspect later about where to improve.
 
As a product manager, when I work on a backlog or new feature or new initiative - there are two types of KPI which I focus on. Definitely the KPI measuring the success is important. The performance of the product, which is delivered, definitely needed to note. But there are few internal KPI, which is not related to the product or feature rather than the performance of the plan or process which I put into. Understanding the vision, defining roadmap, product strategy, customer empathy etc. these are definitely the core job of product manager. But we also need to focus on the costing, timelines, team performance. If we put a KPI for them, it will show you the health of your team.
 
Now some might argue that these are project management KPI, not related to product manager's job. These are more like admin work, not related to product manager's core job description. But my point is, if I am leading a team for product development, I also needed to know the vibration of my team. Efficient plan or process leads to efficient teamwork and delivery of assignments. For example - Let's assume the new feature release of your product is successful and generated revenue as expected. But during the delivery, you find out that you missed the timeline, your cost is high, to many iterations to get the required budget etc., to many issues reported in the UAT phase - do you think the end-to-end system just worked fine here? Definitely NO!! Starting from scratch, performance needs to be monitored for every component to make the initiatives successful.
 
Attached some KPI example which I set up for my tasks, to check on the internal process and plan.