How Francesca Implemented Company-Wide Design Metrics
Francesca Terzi is a Munich-based, Italian-born Strategic Product Designer. Outside of work, she's an avid bicyclist, pizza lover, and enjoys painting the landscapes that she finds on her hiking journeys.
By Francesca Terzi, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
I work for a startup belonging to a large German corporation with an app for managing insurance and finances. Our startup has a robust tracking system and leverages this data to measure revenue, marketing growth, and other business-focused metrics. The Managing Director came to me and asked me how I measure the performance of the UX Team, and I didn't have a straightforward answer. We are for sure measuring many things at the company, but not the aspects that are particularly product-driven. My objective was to present UX-driven metrics that measured the product's success at my company in a compelling way.
The metrics we had in place served the needs of the business but not the product, and my team and I took on the challenge of coming up with metrics to measure the product's performance.
Luckily, one year after completing the d.MBA, I took part in an alumni activity called the d.MBA circles, so I had the knowledge of fellow UX designers at my disposal to help me tackle this challenge. I wanted to find out how members in my circle measured the success of their products in their respective organizations. The group shared metrics they've previously used to measure the success of design, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), task completion score, and time on task. I also started doing independent desktop research on product-driven metrics. One of the resources I used in my research was article: How to estimate the ROI of design work.
How are other businesses measuring the success of their UX? I was able to find this out in the d.MBA circles, which ended up being really helpful.
Once I felt like I'd done my due diligence in the d.MBA circles, and via my research, I was ready to take on some new ideas for management and wanted to co-create the new metrics via a collaborative workshop. This workshop helped us define product metrics for the company, as we had to go back to the basics and dig deep into our north star metric and value proposition. It turned out that we were neglecting to measure the success of a massive aspect of the business, which was not a direct revenue generator for the company. So, we decided to plan how to correctly measure it, both from a business and product perspective.
If your business KPIs are not in line with your Product KPIs, this could present a huge problem for you and the design team in the future. Not only are you not aligned in terms of metrics, but then you’re also not in line in terms of what you’d both like to accomplish.
This workshop allowed us to develop new, company-wide north star metrics, and it has also implemented a strategy for measuring product success. As a result of these discussions about design metrics, we decided to alter our north star metrics, as it became clear that our entire strategy needed some tweaking. We now measure customer funnels and journeys and how they navigate the various features using our product analytics tool. Our KPIs are rooted in conversion as a business metric, but the journeys have been mapped out and measured in conjunction with conversion.
Now we have discussions with various product managers and ask them: What makes this feature successful for users and for us as a team? Then we map this out, document it, and give it to the data team to implement it in the dashboard.
The business and product goals are now much better aligned, and we're on our way to developing dashboards to measure funnels and user journeys. We define together what needs to be in the dashboard, both from a design and business perspective. The new combination of business and product-driven metrics allows us to challenge our assumptions, break down silos, and understand a holistic picture of our products.