Many claim to be data-driven, but most focus solely on revenue, a lagging indicator of past performance. By the time revenue drops, it's too late to take corrective action. Being truly data-driven means identifying and influencing the inputs to revenue, known as driver metrics or KPIs. The key to making this happen is the Weekly Metrics Review meeting, my favorite and most impactful ritual of the week. Weekly Metrics Meeting goes over: (a) All of the driver metrics that lead to revenue, (b) voiced over by the directly responsible individuals that own them, (c) on a weekly basis. I’ve seen the transformative effect this ritual has had on my teams at SurveyMonkey, Miro, Amplitude, and now at Dropbox: everyone is on the same page and tracking the same metrics. No more data drift. No more misalignment. No more distrust in data. This one meeting allows the team to focus on executing in the same direction. -> To get started, begin by identifying the driver metrics. This means building a bottom-up forecast model (i.e. actual math formula) to connect these metrics to output revenue. These usually include sign ups, free to paid conversion, churn rate, etc. -> Then, understand which driver metrics need to change/lift to achieve the desired revenue scenario. These become your assumptions. -> The Weekly Metrics Review meeting focuses only on the driver metrics with assumptions against them. -> Lastly, identify the people who will own each metric, coordinating activities across departments to drive the desired lift. -> Go over these metrics with all DRIs on a weekly basis. Trust me, it's a game changer once you perfect it. More details on how to make it happen on my blog: https://lnkd.in/eg36Ud2p P.S. Thank you to my wonderful newsletter sponsor, Enterpret! #growth
Leah Tharin
3w
Our Health Metric: CEO's Mood
Revenue is a fairly sophisticated metric. Number of features shipped is the golden standard in the industry these days.
Jeff Narucki
3w
100%, but still better than "Likes"
John James
3w
I'm still yet to meet an actual 'data driven' team in all my years. It's so rare. and the ones that say they are, are the worst.
What’s your North Star metric? ….expansions 🫣
Paul Levchuk
3w
This post reminds me of the fact that a lot of companies don't have Analytics leaders at all.
Great approach. I have also worked in such approach with the only difference that instead of weekly metrics meeting we had weekly auto-generated blog post about needed metrics. A more asynchronous process, where everyone can comment the post in the best time.
100% agree. However, I’ve encountered some difficulties when applying this to B2B SaaS company: 1. Multiple touch points: even if the % rate from customer demo to payment changed, I am not sure, if this is due to product changes, or some changes in the sales script 2. Longer Sales Cycles: even if we apply some product changes to prevent churn, we will see results in about 1 month. Which makes weekly meetings useless How did you overcome these challenges while applying this approach to B2B SaaS?
Many claim to be data-driven, but make foolish claims like you should have a weekly metrics meeting 🙈 TL:DR - this is a terrible idea! 1. Anyone who has led a truly data-driven team knows that reporting metrics on a weekly basis leads to a ton of wasted resources overreacting to small shifts in trends. Only the individual directly responsible for the performance of each metric should be looking at them on anything shorter than a 4 week period. Senior leadership needs to be coached to not be concerned with week-to-week metrics. 2. A truly data-driven approach recognizes that profit is the only metric that actually matters. Everything else is just context. Having a weekly meeting to discuss driver metrics encourages the team to focus on metrics that can contribute to profit, but don't necessarily do so. Great job, you've increased website traffic WoW by gaining a bunch of accidental clicks from a platform displaying video ads with a slightly off center X. Or you've increased registrations by offering a no-deposit necessary bonus. Meanwhile the bottom line is suffering. 3. What you are describing is micro management, not data-led strategy. You want people to prepare a report for a meeting every week that shouldn't exist 🤯
B2B SaaS Marketing advisor
3wThis is the way