Measuring KPIs
Weekly musings about life as PM
We recently completed a round of trial appraisals and had to review our KPIs. It was…not great. There were either KPIs that we hadn’t started working on yet or that we had completed but didn’t know how we were doing which counted automatically as a 0. These KPIs are also shared by others in the squad. 😬
Perhaps it’s because we don’t have a mature data analysis and tracking set up but here’s are some key steps that we’ve needed to do as a team to help measure our KPIs.
- Capture the data if you don’t already have access to it
- Getting access to the data
- Focus on your main KPI first
Scenario: We recently deployed a feature to our pickup and dropoff (PUDO) points and wanted to measure its efficacy by having our mid to high performing PUDO points access the feature at least 4 times a month.
1. Capture the data if you don’t already have access to it
While we were building our feature, we realized that we didn’t have a way to track which PUDO point was accessing a particular page or taking a particular action. As such, we had to start by passing in a unique identifier for each PUDO point, the PUDO ID, into Google Analytics every time a PUDO user accesses a page or takes an action.
2. Getting access to the data
After deploying the feature, we went into Google Analytics and tried filtering the page views for that feature by the PUDO ID. But alas! It wasn’t available. Turns out, we needed to first set up the PUDO ID as a custom dimension in Google Analytics.
We also needed to get access to how we were classifying our PUDOs. Thankfully we were able to rely on our local teams to provide that data to us. However, the data provided was missing the PUDO ID. For that, we had to turn to Metabase to retrieve the PUDO IDs for the list of PUDOs provided.
3. Focus on your main KPI first
Now that we finally had all the data needed, we obtained the number of page views for each PUDO point and analyzed the average page views based on whether they were classified as mid to high or low performing. While there were definitely lots of other interesting data that we could’ve analyzed such as the average time spent on the page, what sections the PUDO points were clicking on etc, we focused on our main KPI first. It prevented us from being distracted and overwhelmed by all the data.
Are you and your team also starting out on your journey with data and KPIs? Or have you been through it already? What are/were some of the things that we can do to be better at measuring and tracking our data? Do reach out to share any tips! Our data analysis approach and process is rudimentary at best and I’d be interested to learn how we can improve!
