How do you align your product success metrics with your company objectives?

Many companies have some overarching goal they’re working towards at any given point. You can call this whatever you want, a KPI, a business goal, a North-star or something similar. Whatever it is we as product managers need to be able to align what we are doing with that goal. So how do you do that. Well, the starting point is for the business itself to be clear on metrics and how these are communicated internally. There should be a lot of clarity in this regard. Once you, as a product manager, are aware of this then I’d suggest the next thing to do is to get the team together in a room, and I’d get the whole team if possible, and brainstorm some ways to meet this objective. You could do this with stickies on a board or if you work remotely using a collaboration tool like Miro or Mural.

Once you’ve hashed this out, the next step would be to affinity map the ideas so you group them around some form of theme. So, for example, one theme could relate to additional features, upselling to 3rd party partner products or increasing the conversion rate. Note, none of these are solutions per se, and I’d avoid solutionising at this stage. I’d focus on the main themes. Once you’ve got the main themes you could vote on the ones you want to tackle or form a smaller group, e.g. amigos, or product and tech leadership with UX and scrum master etc and then decide on which of these objectives you want to tackle.

Once you’ve worked out the objectives you could then thing of Key results, which are essentially the how of achieving the objective. Below is an example. As with all things in Product, there’s no right answer here and it all depends on your context.