In larger companies, it’s not uncommon for a whole swathe of teams to be once removed from the company’s end-customers. There are countless examples, from internal tooling and developer enablement through to backend architecture, design component support, localisation / internationalisation, data transformation and platforming — the list goes on. These teams have stakeholders or products that stand between them and delivering end-customer value, and their impact on end-customer metrics isn’t nearly as clear as those implementing features to be directly interacted with by end-customers.
Understandably, this puts product managers in a peculiar position when company visions are always (and necessarily) centred around end-customer value delivery. As I’ve previously explored, when you’re in this situation as a backend team, it’s often most useful and valuable to frame and treat the stakeholders that stand between you and end-customers as if they are your end-customers.
The question does remain though, how exactly can you define and measure success for these enablement products and teams?
It’s very easy to tie yourself in knots as a product manager trying to draw a clear line between your enablement work and end-customer value. In my experience however, avoiding trying to do this altogether is actually the key to setting fair, actionable and valuable success metrics for enablement products and teams.
Defining and measuring success is made much simpler by framing and treating your stakeholders as your end-customers. After all, enablement teams are solving business problems for company stakeholders. Your stakeholders are your addressable market — identify, observe and deeply understand them, their workarounds and the jobs they need to get done. Deliver things that fill unmet needs and relieve pains for them.
As usual though, unfortunately there is no one-size fits all in terms of measuring success. It depends on what your product is and what value you’re attempting to deliver to your users. That said, below are a handful of measurements I’ve found useful for setting direction, understanding problems and demonstrating the success (or failure) of enablement products and teams.
Some of these might seem obvious, but often the simplest things work best. One thing I have tried to do here is capture areas of measurement that should apply to most enablement or end-customer-removed teams to some degree or another, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.
#product-management #data-visualization #metrics #backend-development #skyscanner
