Learn with me: KPIs

Learn With Me is a series where I write about a process, tool or similar that I need to learn for my current UX position.

What are KPIs?

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are important to any business that is interested in systematically and consistently tracking their goals. When a business, such as the one I work in, has several teams, each of the teams has their own set of goals that contribute to company’s goals. For example software and platform developers are interested in tracking most critical production metrics (e.g. increase code-complexity apdex score), the sales team might be interested in tracking their sales growth or the average profit margin, UX team could measure their performance by looking at their average ticket completion rate. What we all share in common are the metrics.

What are metrics?

Metrics translate how all teams contribute to the global well-being of a company. They are values or numbers that are being visualized on dashboards. The ultimate goal is to give status of processes that are tied to a company’s success.

Examples

After setting up how metrics can represent business goals, the next step should cover finding the right set of activities related to these goals:

1. What questions should the data answer?
2. What software/technology should be used for data analysis?

Granted you are a business offering vehicle sharing services. Your key performance indicator will be something related to the utilization of vehicles, number of bookings or customer life time value. These indicators will tell how well your business is doing.