Product Management at Amazon | AWS Executive Insights
Traditional project metrics, like adherence to the timetable, budget, and scope, have their place. But our focus is on customer outcomes, so we measure product team performance against speed, agility, and meeting customer needs.
The metrics that matter will change and evolve over a product lifecycle. When launching something that didn’t exist before, product teams guided by a product manager rely on gut and intuition to determine what to measure, grounded in their intimate understanding of the customer and the problem they’re solving. When the first versions of a product are in the customer’s hands, they turn their attention to gathering insight on what they love about it and what’s not working or frustrating for them. At this stage, they prioritize metrics such as customer usage, feature value, error rates, and adoption trends. As the product grows more refined and gains traction in subsequent versions, product team attention turns to scaling and running the product or business more efficiently and effectively. Operational metrics, such as revenue, profitability, and operational risk, become increasingly important at this stage. Product teams are clear about what they’re measuring at each stage of the product adoption and maturity lifecycle and ensure that the metrics are actionable.
Transparency and visibility among product teams are also critical. As product teams iterate with customers and feed cyclical data to the enterprise level, a portfolio view shows how product lines, geographies, and customer segments are performing and informs further strategy developments. Portfolio transparency also helps business units identify issues.
