Measuring What Matters

According to recent industry research, only 26% of product teams have high visibility of their product ROI, and merely 31% are confident they're building the right products for their customers.

Enterprise cycles are long, stacks are complex, and one bad decision can cost millions. Yet many teams still track vanity metrics & graphs while missing the few signals that predict trust, expansion, and ROI.

Metrics should be a steering wheel, not a scoreboard.

Drawing on Shreyas Doshi's work on the six product-metric families, plus HEART/OKRs/North Star and the discipline of counter-metrics, I use a simple, durable lens that Enterprise Product Leaders and teams can rally around.

The Six Pillars of Enterprise Product Metrics

1. Health Metrics: Your Product's Vital Signs

Think of health metrics as the heartbeat of your product. Before anything else, your enterprise product must be available and perform at the level your customers expect; those expectations are non-negotiable.

Key Health Metrics to Track:

• System Uptime: Enterprise clients expect 99.9%+ availability.
• Response Times: Sub-second latency isn't optional
• Error Rates: Both client-side and server-side
• Data Integrity: Loss rates, corruption incidents
• Performance Degradation: Load times under stress

Enterprise Reality: Health metrics aren't sexy, but they're existential. A consumer app might survive occasional hiccups; an enterprise product dies by them.

Leadership Insight: Don't delegate health metrics entirely to engineering; it is a shared responsibility with the customer success and product organization. As product leaders, we must understand and own these numbers because they directly impact every other metric category.

2. Usage Metrics: Understanding the Daily Reality

Usage metrics reveal how your product lives and breathes within your customer's organization. These are your window into the actual, not what you expected and built, user experience.

What to Track:

• Time-of-day/Day-of-week patterns: When does real work happen?
• Feature Utilization Rates: What's actually being used vs. what you built?
• User Flow Paths: How do users navigate your product? vs. your user journey specs
• Session Duration and Frequency: Engagement depth
• Help Documentation Access: Where users struggle.

Enterprise Nuance: In B2B, usage patterns tell stories. A sudden spike in password resets might signal a new cohort onboarding. Documentation searches clustering around specific features reveal friction points that you never write the user journey specs for.

Leadership Insight: Usage metrics are your reality check. That revolutionary feature your team spent six months building shows usage <5% adoption after launch; it's time for hard conversations about product-market fit and customer discovery processes.

3. Satisfaction Metrics: The Voice of Your Customer at Scale

In an enterprise, a single dissatisfied customer can torpedo your quarter—or your company. Satisfaction metrics provide early warning signals that help prevent issues from escalating to executive levels.

What to Track:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Segment by user role and tenure
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Overall and feature-specific
• Support Ticket Sentiment: Beyond resolution time
• Executive Sponsor Engagement: The real decision-makers

Enterprise Reality: In B2B, satisfaction is multi-layered. End users, administrators, and executives all define "satisfaction" differently. Your metrics must capture this complexity.

Leadership Insight: Low satisfaction scores are rarely about the product alone. They often reflect misaligned expectations, poor onboarding, or inadequate customer success. Use satisfaction metrics to drive cross-functional improvements, not just product changes.

4. Ecosystem Metrics: Your Product in Context

No enterprise product exists in isolation. Ecosystem metrics measure how well you play with others, vendors, partners, and integrators; and in an enterprise, integration is the key to success.

What to Track:

• Integration Adoption: Which integrations drive value?
• API Usage: External developers building on your platform
• Partner Ecosystem Growth: Solutions built around your product
• Market Share Movement: Your position in the competitive landscape
• Share of Wallet: Expansion within existing accounts; influence revenue.

Enterprise Reality: The most successful enterprise products become platforms. Salesforce isn't just CRM; it's an ecosystem. Your ecosystem metrics should track not just the current state but the potential for platform evolution.

Leadership Insight: Strong ecosystem metrics often predict future success better than current revenue. A thriving developer community or increasing integration adoption suggests product stickiness that translates to long-term value.

5. Adoption: Enterprise Signal of Product–Market Fit

Adoption metrics show how value spreads and sticks across an enterprise, beyond a pilot, across roles, regions, and real transaction volume. This is where “we shipped” turns into “they run their business on it.”

What to Track:

• Seat Activation & Shelfware: active seats ÷ licensed seats (by role & org unit); shelfware % to spot stalled rollouts.
• Volume Penetration: % of eligible work routed through the new path (e.g., % claims using the new rules engine).
• Role Coverage & Stickiness: % target roles active 3 of the last 4 weeks; sessions-to-task-completion per role.
• Workflow & Region Coverage: priority workflows live per BU/site/region vs. plan; “gold path” completion rate.
• Time-to-Value (TTFV/TTSV): days to first and second verified success per account.
• Expansion Velocity: new sites/regions/LOBs live per quarter; net license expansion.

Enterprise Nuance: Adoption arrives in waves—pilot → department → division → company-wide. A 10% rate in a pilot may be a red flag; the same rate enterprise-wide can be stellar. Spikes in activation with flat volume often mean training-only adoption; The real signal isn’t “users logged in”, it is completed action through the new path.

Leadership Insight: Adoption is an output of Health (reliability/latency), Usage (valuable actions), Satisfaction (confidence by role), and Ecosystem (integrations, security/procurement). When adoption lags, diagnose inputs first. Celebrate volume penetration and role coverage, not vanity logins.

Example phase gates: Pilot exit = role activation ≥ 60%, volume penetration ≥ 30%, TTFV ≤ 14 days. Pair every target with a counter-metric (activation ↑ and shelfware ↓).

6. Outcome Metrics: The Bottom Line: North Star

Ultimately, every metric must connect to business outcomes. These are your north star metrics. In an enterprise, these are the ones that matter in board meetings and determine your product's future.

What to Track:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Growth and composition
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR): The enterprise gold standard
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback: Efficiency of growth
• Gross Margin: Especially for product-led growth
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Long-term value creation

Enterprise Reality: In enterprise, outcome metrics have long feedback loops. A feature shipped today might not impact ARR for 12-18 months. This is why leading indicators (adoption, satisfaction) are crucial; they predict future outcomes.

Leadership Insight: The best product leaders connect every product decision to outcome metrics, even indirectly. Could you tie that UX improvement to revenue? Look for the path through satisfaction → retention → NRR → ARR.

The Integration Challenge: Making Metrics Actionable

The magic happens when you understand the interconnections among these six categories and use them to drive decisions.

The Cascade Effect

1. Poor health metrics → reduced usage
2. Reduced usage → lower adoption
3. Lower adoption → decreased satisfaction
4. Decreased satisfaction → weak ecosystem participation
5. Weak ecosystem → poor business outcomes

This cascade model helps you identify root causes.

Declining revenue (outcome) might trace back to performance issues (health) from six months ago.

The Leadership Imperative

As product leaders and founders, our role isn't just to track metrics; it is to build a metrics-driven culture that balances quantitative rigor with qualitative insight.

Three Principles I Live By:

1. Metrics Inform, They Don't Decide: Data should start conversations, not end them. The moment we stop questioning our metrics is the moment we stop learning.
2. Every Metric Has a Cost: Tracking everything means focusing on nothing. You should be ruthless about which metrics earn dashboard space.
3. Metrics Without Action Are Vanity: If a metric doesn't change behavior, it's just expensive decoration. Every metric should have a clear "if this, then that" action plan.

The Path Forward for Enterprise Product Leaders

The enterprises we serve are transforming. With 92% of product leaders now accountable for revenue (up from 47% just two years ago), the stakes have never been higher. The old playbook of shipping features and hoping for adoption no longer works.

Success requires a systematic approach to measurement that acknowledges the unique complexities of enterprise products:

• Long sales cycles demand predictive metrics
• Multiple stakeholders require segmented analysis
• Platform ambitions necessitating ecosystem thinking
• Regulatory requirements mandating health metrics excellence

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.

Every metric we track, every dashboard we build, every analysis we conduct should serve one purpose: building products that enterprises can trust with their most critical operations.