Measuring What Matters Means Putting Business Priorities First
Measurement Planning isn’t the sexiest work, but it’s so. damn. important. There is an art to crafting a measurement plan that sits at the right level and encompasses the right priorities to measure what truly matters to your business. If you haven’t felt the power of a measurement plan in the work you do, I’d be curious if those measurement plans have fallen victim to one of the common issues we’ve seen inside of so many organizations. In fact, why don’t you pull out your most recent measurement plan right now and look at it while you read this article! (If you’re on mobile, you get a pass, but be sure to take a look when you get back to your desk! And if you haven’t worked with a measurement plan before, you’re in the right place to learn how to get started.)
Unifying teams instead of dividing them
I can’t tell you the number of companies we’ve worked with where the data and analytics teams have a separate set of goals from their business partners. Besides a proper meta analysis on program health, what analysis is being conducted where the data team is their own client? What in the world is worth an analytics team prioritizing if not to move the business forward? Obviously, that’s not what the data teams are intending, but this illustrates a misalignment. And when this is present, it’s also likely that we’ll discover marketing or product teams have goals that are lacking as well — typically metric selection and target setting — but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Imagine, instead, measurement plans that unify the data teams with their business counterparts, where, together, the teams can use these goals to organize and orchestrate their efforts. And where, together, they can check-in on the progress against those meaningful business goals to understand where they are pacing against the expectations that were set and agreed upon.
💡 Imagine having unambiguous alignment between teams, from top to bottom.
This is the first important principle of a supportive and functional measurement plan. When done right, they create focus between the teams.
Outcomes versus outputs
Another weakness that we see in measurement plans is letting outputs sneak in and take center stage instead of staying outcome focused. This again is super common and it’s because, by nature, outcomes are harder to measure, and it’s human nature to want to “get credit” for all the things you’re investing your time into!
Take a quick scan down your measurement plan that you pulled up — do you see anything that resembles the following:
- Complete migration project
- Launch new brand campaign
- Deliver MVP of a new feature
- Roll-out a chatbot
- Prepare for 3rd party cookie deprecation
- Attain an average email clickthrough rate above our benchmark
- Achieve a conversion rate of 5%
If so, you’ve got an outputs issue! To be clear, this isn’t saying that this work isn’t important or even that they’re not the right things to prioritize, but measuring your progress through project milestones isn’t going to tell you how the business is performing or how your efforts are impacting business performance. And we would argue that this is more than a semantics thing. Yes, a reframing of some of these outputs can get us to outcomes, but that reframing also changes the nature and focus of the work.
Let’s Take an Example: Rolling Out a Chatbot
This may have been a directive from above, so you know you and your team(s) just have to make it happen, but why was this order given? Perhaps this exec read a LinkedIn case study post that touted a 247% decrease in calls to the call center through the implementation of a chatbot. Now you can translate that to the outcome of, “Reduce level 1 calls into the call center.” This now allows you to set metrics and targets associated with a meaningful business goal.
This also empowers your team to think of problems that stand in the way of achieving this goal such as, “It’s not easy for customers to self-service within the app experience.” One solution hypothesis to shrink this problem might be to roll out a chatbot, but you can also explore others that might make a significant impact, such as adding an FAQs page to the hamburger menu.
And for that chatbot solution hypothesis, this reframing will force it to be performant against your expectations. Instead of everyone being focused on the completion of the chatbot rollout project, you’ve kept yourself open to pivot. What if the proof-of-concept of the chatbot made no material impact on level 1 call volume? Now you can look at another provider or revisit that “build versus buy” discussion to ensure that whatever you implement demonstrates the expected results.
And, back to that executive, think of the LinkedIn post they’ll be able to author to share the measurable impact!
This second principle, outcomes over outputs, allows you to see at a glance the health of the business — not how well each team was able to check tasks off a list.
Metric selection and target setting
I’m pretty sure this section could be at least three posts on its own (and it might be some day), but for now we’ll keep it simple. Another trap that measurement plans can fall into is either not selecting metrics and setting targets at all, or setting ones that don’t illustrate the intention of the goal itself.
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Goals are the answer to the question:
“What are we trying to achieve?”
That question has an immediate follow-up question:
“How will we know if we’ve done that?”
This second question is where selecting metrics and setting targets comes into play. You want to ensure that each goal has at least one to three(-ish) metrics and associated targets set to accurately paint the picture.
A Marketing Example
Let’s say our outcome-oriented goal is “increase awareness in our new market.” A metric that you can frequently find associated with this goal is impressions. NOTE: outputs can sneak in here too and show up as vanity metrics! Some more meaningful metrics might be “unaided and aided awareness of potential customers within the new markets,” or maybe there’s a mechanism to “request more information” and you can set a metric there. Don’t worry if you can’t put your hands on all this exact data on day one; you can always build to that through prioritization of effort — it’s more important to be looking at the right things.
Target setting often gives teams a lot of consternation:
“What if we need to measure something we’ve never done before and we have no baseline to compare to?”
“What if I pick a number that’s too aggressive and we miss the goal?”
No worries! It’s way more important to pick a number and learn down the line that it needs to be adjusted than to not draw a line in the sand so you can objectively evaluate at a future point whether or not you’ve met or exceeded your goal.
And that’s not to say you can always just move the goal post later, but lift a little burden off your shoulders — especially the first time you go through this with the cross-functional team. There are a few tactics that we’ll get into in later posts that can help ease the pressure of this process, but the easiest one of the three methods is called “pick a number.” And, luckily, it works exactly how it sounds: someone in the room just picks a number, and if anyone has any heartburn about that being too high or too low, good! Now they can counter with a new number, and you can keep doing this until the heartburn subsides. Target set!
The principle to adhere to here is to ensure you follow-up the hard work of agreeing upon and setting the business-outcome goals with the oftentimes even harder work of selecting the metrics to measure those goals and setting the associated targets.
The practice of performance measurement
How fast does your business move? Is one cycle or season an entire year? Do you only identify new problems or new ideas once a year? Then why in the world do so many organizations spend so much time in the annual planning cycle at the close of their fiscal or calendar year to never check in again on the progress against those goals until the next planning cycle? Building a measurement plan is only valuable if you also establish an intuitive and scalable process for meaningfully measuring progress against those goals over time. I’m gonna say it again louder for the folks in the cheap seats:
Don’t let your measurement plan be a tree that falls in the forest with no one around!
At facts & feelings we like to elevate performance measurement to a monthly ceremony (very much in the style of Agile) that both the business partners and data teams are invited to. This ceremony starts with a quick scan on the progress against the previously agreed upon goals (leveraging a performance measurement dashboard), followed by a discussion on why we’re off track if anything is pacing behind.
This is also where we get to check-in on those problems:
- Do they still exist?
- Are there new ones to add?
- Are there any problems we need to resize or promote to a Problem Most Worth Solving (PMWS)?
The last agenda item is progress against the solution hypotheses:
- What have we learned?
- What action are we taking now that we know?
- What are we going to prioritize next?
This check-in ceremony is another principle of cogent measurement plans.
💡 Set it and forget it goals are not going to move your business forward.
Ensure you can reap the benefits of investing in measurement planning through performance measurement.
Don’t sleep on measurement planning
Hopefully it’s easy to see the value created through measurement planning for not only the data and analytics teams, but for their business partners. It’s so much easier for those business partners in marketing, product, digital, etc. to easily find value in the work the data and analytics teams produce when it’s pointed at what matters most to them and their leadership. It should feel like a waste of talent to plan projects, campaigns, and roadmaps in the absence of sitting down to do this work; business priority-focused goal setting makes way for material discussions of problems creating friction on the path to achieving those goals and is a helpful lens to prioritize hypothesized solutions.
If you’ve accidentally stepped into one of these common traps with measurement planning, first of all, you’re not alone. And secondly, hopefully you’re excited to do the hard work to reap the benefits of investing in that exercise! And if you’re about to embark on your first measurement plan journey, we hope this was helpful in getting started! As always, we’d love to hear from you and answer any questions you have in shifting towards business-priority focused measurement planning. Don’t hesitate to reach out!
