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In a perfect world, hitting the right product outcomes for product teams would be a left-hand play every other month or quarter.
However, that’s not the case.
The world is not perfect and there are multiple conflating variables that might impact your product discovery success. Think of outliers like Covid-19 lockdowns.
And needless to say, the product discovery process is also an iterative process that improves over time. A high-performing discovery team will hit the right outcomes better than a low-performing team and that performance improves over time as the discovery process itself improves.
As Tim Herbig points out:
Keep in mind that the primary job of a Product Discovery OKR is to make Product Discovery work a visible priority for your team. It doesn’t always need to be the perfect incarnation of existing OKR blueprints.
OKRs, as the tradition goes, are super helpful in structuring your work during Product Discovery.
Product discovery involves two fundamental aspects: refining the process itself and achieving specific product-related objectives.
→ Process OKRs focus on enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the product discovery methodologies you adopt.
→ Product OKRs measure the tangible outcomes derived from these efforts, that you can measure after product delivery (And the most important ones for your stakeholders, as well).
In short, teams should be evaluated by both categories of OKRs, i.e. how efficient was their cadence of activities and how they performed against their outcome.
Product teams certainly spend a significant time in setting up the actual product discovery process, so it makes total sense to make that a visible priority for your team. Setting up OKRs at this stage is a must. Let’s look at a few examples:
Example 1: User Insights
O - Collect 100+ actionable user insights
Example 2: Time efficiency
O - Improve the efficiency of product discovery process
These metrics guide the direction of the product such that it can significantly accelerate the impact of the product on the business. Each product manager can define individual objectives, crafting key results for their product teams spanning design, engineering, and other functional departments. For instance:
Example 1: Customer satisfaction
O - Improve customer satisfaction and retention by Q1
Example 2: Product adoption
O - Boost product adoption rates by Q2
Example 3: Business revenue
O - Â Achieve $5M ARR by EoY
Here’s a quick exercise to build your own OKR dashboard.
Get access to our template here → https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KbUmG42y9pTuxsBtbRar4MoMqDrTrljpnys1EhZSS8g/edit?usp=sharing
Measuring product discovery impact requires a healthy balance between optimizing process efficiencies and achieving product-related objectives.
By setting clear process and product OKRs, and leveraging frameworks and real-time data insights, product teams can optimize decision-making and deliver customer-centric solutions that drive growth and satisfaction.
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