Are you using OKRs to align your team’s efforts to the company goals?

We use OKRs at Airtable and we align OKRs from the top to bottom with an app built on Airtable (of course). Every PMM works on objectives that ladder up to marketing OKRs which in turn ladder up to corporate OKRs. Pretty standard stuff and we find that it works well for us. Not every company works this way though. Salesforce famously uses a method called the V2MOM which is more complex but is similar in spirit.

Key results, in aggregate, should indicate whether or not the objective was achieved.

This is a PMM best practice. Any company should have a larger strategic framework that supports it’s future growth. Cascading out of that larger framework should be both product and revenue goals. I think about aligning PMM first to revenue goals, because I’ve focused most of my career in B2B marketing. Secondarily, I’d focus on product goals. 

The above is how I’d rank the focus of my team’s impact, but I find that in practice the way measurement typically works is that you measure product impact first, and revenue impact second. My input metrics / leading indicators most often align most closely to product goals or are most easily measurable in partnership with my product colleagues, while it can be more challenging to attribute PMM impact to revenue goals. 

I think about it in two vectors: 

1. input metrics / leading indicators <-- these most often align closely with a product team 

2. output metrics / lagging indicators <-- these most often align closely with a revenue team 

More specifically: 

Input metrics (things PMM can drive directly) 

1. Organic Passive Reach (e.g. content on .com, blogs, community posts, changelogs, social content, thought-leadership content on external sites) 

2. Organic Active Reach (also sometimes called “hand raisers”) (e.g. lead form completions, webinars, event attendance) 

3. In-Product Activation (e.g. in-product notifications) 

4. Paid Scale (e.g. advertising, paid social, retargeting)

5. Co-Marketing (e.g. co-marketing with strategic partners, affiliate programs, resellers) 

Output metrics (things PMM is expected to have an impact on) 

1. Product adoptions 

2. New revenue 

3. Upsell revenue 

4. Churn / retention 

5. NPS 
   

My goal is to take a mix of the metrics above, map them to the company’s broader OKRs and then build out marketing programs designed to move each of the metrics. Starting with the metrics and the quantitative goal for the marketing programs makes both expectation setting with cross-functional partners clear, and the measurement of my team’s impact.