Whether you’re doing OKRs, GSCs, KPIs or some other 3 letter process, a generally accepted good practice when building a product and company is to tie measurable results to goals. Try to keep these goals “SMART” – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-specific.

My manager, Derek Haller, spoke about the importance of using measurable results when Driving Business Outcomes during our last ProductTank Meetup. Derek and I work at a SaaS company, Social Tables, and we identified the main types of Measurable Results that are relevant to those managing a SaaS product.

Types of Measurable Results for SaaS products

• Behavior (click paths, engagement)
• Business (active users, conversion rate)
• Financial (ASP, billings, time to close)
• Performance (load time, uptime, crashes)
• Operational Costs (storage, hosting)
• Go To Market Costs (acquisition, programs)
• Sentiment (NPS, surveys)
• Environment (PR mentions, comments)

Goals may have a variety of types of measurable results. Depending on the stage of your company, some of these types, such as Operational Costs and Sentiment, may take a back seat to Business and Financial results.

SsaaS

SsaaS, Stock Software as a Service, is a company I just made it up :). We make software for Stock Advisors to analyze a stock. Below are the Objectives and Key Results for SsaaS –

Objective

Successfully Launch MVP Stock Analysis Tool with a Free Two-week Trial Period

Key Results

• Establish ASP of $5,000 / year (Financial)
• Receive press coverage in 5 publications, including TechCrunch (Environment)
• Net Promoter Score > 50. (Sentiment)
• Engagement: 75% of users analyze > 5 stocks. (Behavior)

Time Frame – Q1

Objective

Sunset Two-week Trial Period and Launch Freemium Product

Key Results

• Deliver 1000 new Product Qualified Leads (Go To Market Costs) 
• Reach 500,000 Daily Active Users (Business) 
• Improve user sign up by 10% (Behavior)

Time Frame – April

Objective

Launch Product Rewrite and Sunset old Product

Key Results

• Cut down hosting costs by 30% (Operational Costs)
• Achieve 99.7% uptime (Performance)
• Decrease support inquiries by 10% (Operational Costs)

Time Frame – Q2

Timeboxed Results

It’s nice to set key results and work backwards to figure out when you can achieve those results but some organizations prefer to set OKRs on a timed basis (usually quarterly). Some goals take longer to hit the more traditional key results (i.e. engagement and revenue). For example, if you are embarking on a six month product rewrite that will not have active users in the first quarter you must come up with other ways to validate your product/decisions along the way. You may accomplish this through internal validation and surveys.

Objective

Validate New Stock Comparison Product

Key Results

• 75% of current customers confirm the features on the road map would meet their needs (Sentiment)
• 5 prospects have signed letters of intent to purchase (Financial)
• 90% of the Sales team believes the product is sellable (Sentiment)

Time Frame – Q3

Always Be Learning

Finally, when setting measurable results, it’s effective to have goals and results that are focused on learning. Create a hypotheses to help validate your vision and develop experiments around that hypothesis.

Objective

Determine if Stock Advisors want to display a portfolio publicly

Key Results

• 75% of Stock Advisors surveyed confirm they would like to have their portfolios displayed (Sentiment)
• 50% of Stock Advisors provided with embeddable portfolios use them on their corporate website (Behavior)

Time Frame – December