How does a self-serve product impact product KPI’s?

When I joined my company, my mandate was to improve the way that customers got to value quickly. With the support of a research team, designers, and lots of conversations with customers, I saw an opportunity to build a resource center that consolidated best practice resources and pointed new and experienced customers to the steps needed to get the most value out of their products. The resource center would help customers with self-serve onboarding.

Because I was building a post-sales experience I had to think through my KPIs, and how they could capture or measure good outcomes for the customer. Over the long term, lagging indicators could tell me much benefit this resource brought to customers and their continued satisfaction. However in the short-term I had to lean on available leading indicators. Where I landed was to measure engagement (traffic, clicks, content consumption) and adoption by the customer base (in other words, what percentage of our customers used this resource center?).

I also layered in more data points to help me measure success, such as time to upgrade, and qualitative feedback from our customer advisory board. Taken together, I could use the KPIs and insights to tell the story of what was going well and where we needed further iteration and evolution.