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Performance Metrics: What are the best practices for defining metrics to my tech team?
VR
VR
Vijay Rao, CFA, FRM, Startup Angel Investor, Finance & Funding Expert answered:

I've worked as the Head of Product at my current startup for the past 4 years and have consulted as a product manager to several other startups. Your question leads me to believe that you don't have a dedicated product manager or someone who's job it is to envision, design, and build out your product.

The technology team itself should be measured upon "story points", or points assigned to each task that they are assigned to work on. If you are using the agile software development philosophy, you can measure the story points per sprint to see how much work is getting done. After 2-3 sprints, you should have a really good idea of a) who the most productive members of your team are b) where most of the technology bottlenecks are occurring and c) what skills you have on board and what skill sets you will need to hire for. There are very powerful product management tools that can help you for very little cost.

However, the product management team should be the team that is responsible for envisioning and specifying "user-focused" software and "10X innovative projects". The product manager should be a subject matter expert and should be in contact with clients, prospects, and developers to gather requirements and solicit ideas on how to improve your product. From there, the product manager should create detailed requirements (I personally like agile stories, but there are many ways of doing this) and prioritize each task for the development. The product manager is ultimately responsible for the product, how responsive users are to the product and how innovative and revolutionary it really is in the marketplace.

If you want help setting up your product management team or on additional metrics that you can use to improve your business, I'd be happy to discuss.

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