It’s difficult to manage the P&L, when you don’t have control of the “P” or the “L.”—Rich Nutinsky, Pragmatic Marketing
It’s fairly common for product managers to be asked to act like “mini-CEOs” or “the president of the product. Good idea in concept but harder to implement in real life.
Even if you don’t have actual control over P&L, you can control reporting of P&L. Try using a scorecard approach.
I was working with a team on their scorecard but alas, all of their metrics were focused on development productivity: how many defects, how many hours, how many stories, how many features…?
But what about metrics on the business of the product from your perspective?
- What are development costs against plan? Revenue against plan?
- How many calls to support? Is that more or less than the monthly average? What is the trend?
- How many leads from marketing? How many were rejected by sales?
- What is your win rate and what are the top reasons by you lose?
- What are the trends in Net Promoter Score or other loyalty-related metrics?
- Fundamentally, what are some of the business metrics you should have at your fingertips? What questions are your execs asking that you should be able to answer? Be the source of metrics on the business of the product!
What other metrics would you capture?