A simple way for Product Managers to measure Delivered Value

Regardless of what your product is, one goal rarely changes: make sure you are delivering value to your customer. Which of course is easier said than done. Sometimes it takes a while for value to surface, so how do you know if you are currently delivering the most value? It can often become a guessing game, so the real question is: how do you minimize the likelihood that the value you think you are delivering is wrong?

Thankfully, little data can help paint the picture for you and your agile product development team.

Delivered Value is a lagging indicator, so you’ll want to balance it with a leading metric that you can use to build correlations. To get ahead of the curve, you’ll want to poll your team each release on how much value they think was just delivered.

By keeping it on a simple scale like the example above, team members can quickly weigh in and have a consistent data driven framework from release to release.

Your next step is to poll your customers. This is typically tracked with a net promoter score or customer effort survey. A quick Google search will turn up several tools that will help you with this step. Both are helpful ways to assess product value of new features.

As mentioned above, these surveys are lagging since they are typically only performed every few months or so. But as the results come in, you can match the data in your KPI tracking dashboard against your previous estimations for that time period.

This will give you an understanding of how well the team is predicting value. If the data aligns with each other, keep doing what you are doing! If there is a disconnect — for example, if your estimates are high but customer feedback is low — then it’s time to address the issue as a team and have a more in-depth conversations with customers to better understand where they find value in the product.

It’s not often that something is actually fast and easy, but you can start tracking Delivered Value today, and we’ve found that it has a lasting impact on the team. It helps focus conversations on your goals, on serving the customer’s needs, and measuring the outcomes of the team’s work. We love to put our little data to work, and we’re excited to hear how tracking Delivered Value works for you.