The missing link in your Opportunity Solution Tree (KPI Trees + OST = Better Outcomes!)

They just have no idea what even the business metrics up top even are. Putting stuff in this format really just helps you tell a better story. If you can go through and do this exercise for your own company, it can be a great thing for your career. We've got Steve here. We're going to do a bit of a live demo, which I'm pretty pumped about. I am particularly important to talk about this topic because I think it's one of the most important topics as well inside product. How do we break... outcomes down how do we link work to outcomes ultimately it's also the thing that i see product teams struggle with all the time they're trying to break things down they're trying to make sense of it and if we don't start in a really good spot like we don't start with a good outcome then everything else downstream from that is kind of just starting in a bad spot right yeah quick intro on me so i'm steve klein i'm one of the co-founders of vistally uh so visally is a tool that product teams use to run you know run their whole continuous discovery practice um really tie a lot of the work that they're doing back to the the change in user behavior that they want to see and ultimately the business impact that they're trying to create and if if the tool you're using isn't really built with that idea in mind you're going to end up kind of cobbling together a bunch of different tools to try and do it so something that really is like built from that viewpoint first really really helps you know with this kind of change in the way that you think so yeah um so i have a background in product and design i've co-founded a few startups in the past uh most notably it was a company called status page.io uh we did y combinator way back in the day uh way back in 2013 which is like wild to think how fast time goes right it feels like it's yesterday and holy crap it was 12 years ago um but yeah got acquired by atlassian so i got to move out um to san francisco as part of that uh and work at kind of a big public company so it's cool um so yeah that's me it's got to make you some somewhat of an honorary Aussie working at Atlassian too and being acquired by them so yeah yeah in some ways yeah obviously a ton of a ton of Aussies uh working at Atlassian um I totally blew it I had the opportunity to go to Sydney a couple times and just like scheduling timing didn't work out and we just had a baby around the time we moved out there so a big missed opportunity but yeah would love to get out there someday well let's get into it let's um you want to you want to pull it up we'll We'll go through breaking this down. Yeah, I think one of the easiest ways to kind of illustrate this idea is I'm actually going to share our own Vistaly workspace and kind of talk through how we think about breaking down these bigger lagging business outcomes that product teams sometimes get tasked with down into more actionable, something a product team can actually influence and wrap their head around. Yeah, okay. so here is so this is so this is vistally and this is actually like our own workspace um i've hidden some of the like actual values of the metrics here um for now but i'll show some of the uh like actual data that we're tracking about how uses users are using our product soon um yeah like at its core vistally is you can think about it in some ways as like this mind mapping tool Not too dissimilar from like how teams today use like Big Jam or Miro to create like opportunity solution trees or even do some of this work. But it's structured, it's like more structured in the way that product teams would want to run this process. So it's a little bit of the best of the both worlds, right? It's like the flexibility of being able to like just move around cards and get your thoughts out, but also is like backed with a database in like a way that like product teams would want it to be. um okay so we often talk about this idea how like product teams will get tasked with these kind of like big you know big overarching business goals right the ceo might come to you and say hey churn's been really bad lately i want you to go out and fix i want you to go out and fix churn and that is that's like a terrible thing to to just like throw at a product team i think because it's so open-ended there's no You know, there's no like good guardrails for what kinds of things that you might work on to improve that. And also, I think, I mean, there's a thing around like everyone has like all of their own assumptions around what are even the levers that we might be able to pull to improve retention. The big one for me as well is like when you get given a very broad outcome. it's a problem in multiple ways right the first way is that it's super broad which is kind of what you're saying like there's so many levers like you take what was your example like churn right um but even like we got revenue here right we see that a lot every every company's strategy on the page one of their pillars has got to be growing revenue or something right and it's like there's a million ways that we can make money and on top of that it's also the second thing that i think is a really challenge for product teams and run into it a lot when i'm coaching teams is that it's also something that they're like whoa i'm so far often not all the time but like i'm so far away from that like can i even like i can kind of contribute to it but i don't feel like i can control revenue like i don't control what marketing does and the sales team does if you're like b2b sales led or i don't like this like we have five product lines i own one of them what about if they lost money like and it almost feels unfair too like you you're asking me to do something that i don't really feel like i've control over or i own or i can influence yeah yeah that's exactly right like something as like big and overarching as like the company's annual recurring revenue it's such like a multi-factor equation and realistically you only can control like a small portion of that um yourself um and so i think the like the the strategy is is always let's take these it's basically this let's take these big goals and figure out what are the what are the biggest things that contribute to that and you can kind of like do that recursively until you get to a level that's like this is good scope for a single product team to focus on this sliver of it and as you kind of like scale that out right like i might be focused on this part right marketing marketing's doing this some of the other product teams are are doing it are contributing to other things that ultimately ladder up to growth. But you have to continue to break these big multi-factor problems down into small enough contributing parts that one team can take that and say, cool, we're going to focus on how can we improve this part of it over the next quarter or a couple quarters or however long. Sorry to jump in. Two things we've got through our mind on this one. One of them is for the product leaders out there. This is important because I see this as a crucial part of your role too, with like, you know, what problems are we solving? What outcomes am I defining and giving to teams? But equally, you don't always, so then for the product managers listening to this, you're not always going to be in an environment where like someone's broken down that big thing and made it really specific and... specific to your area and we're going to kind of go through it and give you like real examples of this in a minute so then you also need to learn to do that because rather than you know sheepishly being like all right i guess i'll try and do something about retention you can then break it down and we're going to walk you through it and this is why it becomes a really really crucial skill and such an important skill and then you can communicate back to everybody else and say here is how i think i can contribute to retention right and this is the the outcome that i'm going to then focus on as a result of that and that changes the game for you it changes the conversation it yeah changes a lot sorry totally oh no totally i i think that's a great point i think um being able to like break this break these huge problems down into their like constituent parts uh is a way to be seen as a like strategic um you know thoughtful person and communicator right uh i think most teams certainly down at like the individual contributor product manager level but even although it's shocking how often like i'll go in and like you know someone will sign up for a viscally trial and we'll kind of run this exercise with them and they just have like no idea about like what you know what are the things that ultimately um ladder up to the company's you know overall like revenue numbers like what what are the things that are important to them and so by like creating this clarity for the team like if you can go through and do this exercise for your own company it the amount of clarity that you can create for people often from like the ceo level all the way down to like ic product managers um like it it can be a great thing for your career to to be seen as like this person who wow really like illuminated the situation for everyone Okay, so here's kind of like how we think about it in Vistily, right? So we're like a pretty standard software as a service company. We kind of think about things in terms of like, so we have like our overall annual recurring revenue. And the inputs into that are like, how well are we able to like land new customers basically? And how well are we retaining our existing customers? And so if you get tasked with something like, hey, we really want to work on churn, you need to think about like what are, for your customers, like what are the inputs into churn? And the way we think about it is, okay, well, for us, churn is like a function of how well are our customers able to get the value out of Vistaly that we like say that we're for. These are the things that companies come to Vistily to try and do. And if they're not able to do this, then of course they're going to churn, right? So we've kind of broken it down into these buckets. There's so many different ways that you can think about these things. You could kind of think about it in terms of like jobs, which is kind of what we have here. You can, you know, depending on like your... your own company you can think about this in terms of like segments maybe you're like a multi-product company you can think about this in terms of like um the contribution each product that you have is making um but this is kind of how we've set it up for now um and actually want to call out just this idea that um you know we were talking about earlier how this is it's a it's honestly it's hard to do like we're a small company i'm one of the co-founders and we still even struggle with what is what is the best way for us to like think about and try and model the inputs into retention um and and like specifically how do we even how do we even measure it exactly right there's like some amount of do we have like the product analytics muscle to even like have a good measure for this can we even think about what a good measure is um so i just want to like call out the fact that this is like really difficult um yeah that just is i would say like um i just kind of keep coming back to this idea of the the like overarching theme is you want to take these big these big lagging goals or metrics and keep thinking about how can we break these down into smaller more tangible uh more tangible things um so for us um yeah we'll read through these but we'll kind of like keep going into one of these so like for us a big one is um teams will come to vistally because they want they want to like really understand the opportunity space um and so that means things like um you know understanding understanding their customers problems uh through interviews understanding their customers problems through feedback that's coming in from like sales and support and success um and so we've like even taken this and broken it even further down into uh even like more like leading uh you know like points of value or like inputs into this right um and so you can you can go through this exercise yourself and kind of think about for your own company um how how do these like bigger these bigger metrics ultimately like break down into like smaller more tangible things um One thing I want to call out is kind of this idea that like often when you're creating a KPI tree like this, you'll have these like, they're more, they tend to be like more business, like business focused. It's like what's important to us as a company. And at some point you make this jump from, hey, what things are, from what things are important to the company to what things are important to users or our customers that are the drivers of the things that are important to the company and it kind of highlights this idea that like businesses are this um there there's like this value exchange that has to happen for your business to grow um and so you kind of jump from cool we we as a company like grow we they're like are acquiring new customers we're retaining customers better because we're providing more value to customers in the ways that we say we're going to provide value to them um and so this is another like really interesting part of the exercise too is this this flip from hey like the the business metrics only happen if we're able to like do better on these product metrics if we're able to get more of our customers to more widely adopt the product more frequently use the product for there to be less friction as they're doing it right and so you kind of go from this sometimes like more like nebulous like here's kind of like the jobs that we're doing for people and you like kind of can keep breaking that down into okay well what like what things would we see in the product that is like indicative that they're getting the value if that makes sense So then just to tie everything back a little bit is I think one of the coolest things about doing this exercise is you get this model of at the very top, it's like, great, here's revenue or here's GMV or whatever it is for your company, that top most business metric. And if you can get things in a state where you've broken that all the way down into its inputs and constituent parts. You can then start to, you can like look across that KPI tree and say, great, where, you know, where are, what's like our, I don't know, our biggest area for improvement, like of all of these, like kind of these like metrics, like which, which ones aren't doing the best. And you can, you can start to like document, like what are the customer problems, pain points, desires that we could address. to improve this improve this like given metric right um so it's i feel like it's just like this great i don't know it's this great exercise and hey we we have this whole model of how the business grows and we have like a whole set of things that we can do better for people to improve that um yeah i think like just to give a tangible example scroll back up because i know we're down at the opportunity layout but like scroll back up um go to like the four drivers that you have or the four inputs into into the retention thing i wonder if this is just going to be a tangible example uh so like like zoom in a little bit so maybe it's easier to read for people and let's just go like zoom in and let's just go to the left and kind of move across so um and this is a quite a high level still because we're like one level down from net revenue retention but we're basically you could you could look at this layer it's just an example and you could go well we've got kind of four key drivers of what we believe being key drivers that that input into or key um yeah key drivers that input into retention and the first one being that teams are making progress on and communicating the impact of their product work the second one being that they can understand the opportunity space third one being that they align on priorities and then we have like a um basically engage like a a joy yes joy was the word i was looking for i remember the ces thing that customer ease score so so then we got like joy so then if you um when you have clear data against this so you can see the ces score there you can this is a good exercise this is basically what steve's saying this is a great exercise to look at these four and go well which one of these are the lowest, right? Based on what we would consider to be a healthy level, right? So maybe 85 out of 100 from a CES score is good. Like, we're just happy if it's above 80 maybe. And then for the other things, it's like, well, what's more in the red? And which one is the most in the red? And then maybe another question you can ask yourself too is like, if we want to increase retention, then which one of these do we believe we could make the most progress on? because maybe trying to get ces from 85 to 90 is like that's that's a small improvement but because we're so close to the top like diminishing value right diminishing returns i should say diminishing returns like going from 10 to 80 is a lot easier than going from 80 to 90 if that makes sense because you started the bar so low so what you're trying to do is like prioritize here and i think the the one the biggest values is and this is why i think it's such an untapped opportunity in companies is we're really asking ourselves like what's the highest leverage here and where do we focus our time and it's it's away from features and solutions like before we even start talking about solutions and stuff let's let's prioritize the problems to focus on yes yeah 100 there's there's definitely like an element of like diminishing returns um and so having these I feel like the further along you kind of get in your company, you get a lot more clarity on and a lot more like analytical, like rigor on a lot of these. We're still, you know, super early startup. So for us, like just bucketed under this is still just kind of these big overarching jobs. And we kind of internally have a sense for like, how well are we doing each of these? And under these, we have some metrics of like how well people are using the product. yeah but like the the the further along you get you know you go from this hey we have this we have this like theory on like what things are the drivers of retention to you get just more analytical clarity on like specifically what are the what usage of the product is like in indicative of retention or um or like top line growth And also historical data, right? Like what's worked well and what doesn't. I just thought of a real tangible example from a client of mine, a coaching conversation the other day, the product manager was doing some of this work and he said to me, he goes, historically, we're so focused on conversion. He goes, historically, the best incremental increase we've done on conversion is 0.3%. So anytime they've chased after conversion with a solution, the best incremental benefit they got was 0.3% in conversion. Now they convert, lots of people it's a b2c product so that's a decent number of people but he's like i was looking at retention the other day and churn and like we have a well above average churn like it's quite high like it's a very leaky bucket and he just was like i just feel like we could have better success like that as a lever point would be better because if we're talking 0.2 0.3 incremental improvements if i can go from like you know 27 churn down to 20 churn like that's going to be tidal waves compared to anti and yeah any conversion increase we could do yeah yeah like i i feel like that yeah that exercise works like all the way up the tree it's even like more impactful the higher you go up the tree right because it's it's like bigger picture what's our strategy and focus right you're you're talking about going okay here's annual here's annual current revenue um maybe like your top line growth is decent but your if your churn is terrible like making that decision about where to focus up the tree is just like kind of like compounding your results um yeah and then but what's cool about that is like you can then you can like do that recursively right it's like cool we know because we have data around it like we can we can see that like churn is such a bigger problem for us than top line growth right now and then you can kind of do that same problem and it's like okay well let's take churn and think about like what are the inputs into that and figure out what are you know what is the biggest um uh like opportunity for improving churn and and you can just kind of keep going keep going down until you get to that great this is like the right amount of scope for a single product team to focus on for a while actually just just one last one expand it go down to the opportunity space that you had up before yeah so obviously this is now going like multiple layers down so we're kind of keep mapping keep mapping keep kind of going down then you can see you can start to add opportunities to it and i really like this way of thinking as well which all or visualizing i should say where like we're really linking those opportunities back to like key key drivers and stuff like it's it's so easy to you know we have opportunities are coming up all the time right like we we notice something or this is a great idea we could do this we could do that but how do you link it in a way that it's not just some linear backlog that's like off hidden and you can actually show the relationship between these two things i think this is another really powerful thing of doing this and then what you can ultimately do which we kind of touched on before is i think a super powerful thing out of all of this is then being able to like storytell right so you're talking about even like the next layer down which is like solutions against this opportunity and being like okay here's here's what we're yeah here's what we're yeah if you want to if you do have any examples we could get down to that cool yeah so then like now we're down at like the solution level and then you can be like like if i just pick one that i can just yeah what's one right here like we just use this last one so allow users to pick a portion of the transcript um to use and create insights right so when you're talking to the rest of the organization and you're talking to them about like uh why are we doing this thing why are we so focused on you know being able to like pick a portion of a like a transcript and and highlight it or whatever that that ends up looking like you can tell this story all the way up you can be like well we're focused on this one because like we're trying to yeah here we go yeah so we're working on this because because really it links to like this opportunity and this opportunity is really important because it links to like these drivers right and then these drivers are really important because it's the biggest problem in our organization like that story i told before right like well we should focus on retention because like we've only got an incremental 0.3 percent in conversion so i think we should be focused on that and what that does is it not only allows you to link the stuff that you're doing to like impact and everything but i also think from like a business perspective and talking to stakeholders and stuff you're actually kind of translating it into language they care about right because like they don't care like we spend so much time with the product and with our customers and stuff and we would love them to have huge amount of empathy with our customers and our users but they're But sometimes they're just not there yet or they just don't. And if you're like, hey, I'm helping you drive more revenue or something like that, they're like, well, great. That's what I ultimately care about. Maybe you're in a company where they've got bonuses and KPIs tied to that. Yes, those things aren't amazing, has normal systems and behaviors and stuff. But if that's really what drives them, if you can link it to what they care about. then awesome like that's how you get them on board that's how you get them to buy into your thing it's like well we're trying to help you get your bonus by doing this right yes yeah no i i love that um i think there's some amount of like putting putting stuff in this format it really just like helps you tell a better story um and really connect i mean that's kind of like the title of the webinar right it's like connecting the dots right i think generally there's this coherent story yeah and kind of goes back to those things we were talking about earlier um it's going to help you be seen as just like a more strategic uh like thoughtful product leader one of the things that i wanted to touch on here as i just a tip having done this before it'll be interesting to hear your perspective on this steve and what you found is those like everyone you said it before steve which was great like everyone has this kind of mental model Most people, I should say, most people in the company have this kind of mental model about how everything kind of links together. And what you're really trying to do is get that down on a page and you're trying to get everyone to align on it. So when people think about like KPI trees, which is really what this is, or maybe this is an extension off a KPI tree, but people always think about like, you know, or value driver trees. They always think about like the metrics. And what I liked about with Steve's example, and just as a general tip. don't obsess over the metrics in actual fact most of the times when i do in fact probably all the time every time that i do this as a workshop with my clients i always start i just get them to put it in plain english like what are your hypotheses what are these assumptions what do you believe to be true oh it's going to be quicker and i don't even care like they just say quicker and i'm like cool whatever we can work out what quicker means and we can we can dissect that later but like it's just about getting it down on the on the page and don't obsess over it yeah yeah yeah i think there's so much value into just like getting yeah getting everything out and and laying everything out in a way that's like visual i think people are we're just naturally very visually oriented and even if you're not putting numbers to everything i think that's totally fine but just getting everything out in this like uh this like visual model so people can like see the relationships between these like either metrics or just like ideas um really helps people to understand what you're saying a lot better and probably another tip like because you can always do the metrics later hypotheses are a great start uh the other one that steve kind of mentioned before is i found it also useful to chunk it down as like business product user not all the time but sometimes it's a useful just chunk in because inevitably you kind of if you're starting at the top and by the way that's another probably tip is you don't need to start at the top like you can start at the bottom and work your way up you can start at the top you can start at the middle it's it's kind of okay just start where you feel comfortable and go in the direction that you feel comfortable but if you chunk it as like three logical buckets where there's a bunch of business metrics that are more like higher level more and business metrics are just essentially things that kind of go across across everything not just the product so like marketing influences it sales, customer success influences, et cetera, et cetera. If you have multiple products, all the products feed into business metrics. And then you'll get into product metrics where things will start to become very specific to a single product. So this is when we get into specific actions you expect users to take in the product. It could even be. conversion and retention on that specific product as opposed to like a total kind of retention type thing if you've got a multi-product environment and then eventually you get lower and lower from there and you start to get into like user outcomes basically it's like we expect users to do this and on the tree that steve had up before you could kind of see that because we had the business outcomes which are kind of the three at the top and then it turned into like product outcomes like these are the behaviors that we expect to see inside the product that lead to retention or we believe lead to retention retention and then below it got very it got really into users it was like it was like three some of them were like users did this three times or something like that right like that's like really user behavior i'm expecting a user to do this x times yeah and sometimes it just helps yeah yep i love that and yeah and i think it really just like highlights this idea of Going back to the value exchange thing, ultimately, people are going to do these things. If we see people do these things, it means they or their company are getting this value from our product, which is ultimately going to improve our own business results. But yeah, breaking it down into those different parts is super helpful. there's a lot of instantly customers you've obviously workshop this a lot with different customers and different companies uh what are some of the common challenges you see product leaders and companies kind of run into when they're trying to do this yeah oh man let's see we've already covered a handful i mean there's some just around like you know a lot of especially as you like go a little bit lower in the organization but like i'm always surprised to see how like few pms or even designer, we get a lot of designers that like kind of come to Vistily to try and run their like research. They just have no idea like what even like the business metrics up top even are. So yeah, like pairing with someone a little more senior or getting like feedback from the CEO or someone on after you do a rough draft and just kind of like talking through those business metrics with them really helps develop that business acumen. I would say another big problem, you actually, you hit on this one earlier. We, you know, a couple of years ago, or maybe even last year, when people would come to Vistaly, we would try and get their entire product org to adopt Vistaly all at once. And you had mentioned like, you don't have to start with like your top most, you know, business number. It's just too much to bite off. There's, you know, moving from a more like output focused way of working to outcomes focused way of working, it's a lot of change management and kind of, you know, cultural friction that comes with that, right? People are like, often pretty set in their own way of working. So by like starting, I would say even just like starting locally with like your area of the product and demo it in all hands or share share it with like a peer product team um and like slow you know try and like slowly get everyone at the company thinking in in this kind of way uh is super helpful if you try and do it all at once it's often like too much too much headwinds to like make um make make good progress on it um let's see obviously like getting getting down to a point where you have we're able to like put good numbers to these things. Like I do think at some point, it's totally fine when you're starting out to like, start with just like the idea, like these bigger ideas are putting it in English. But I do think it's helpful to ultimately get to a point where you are putting specific numbers to things. It just makes it easier to like reason about easier to track easier to easier to let's see like define what success means right like you can start with hey it needs to be quicker but at some point you need like a definition of like what is quick enough right or else you kind of get into everyone's gonna have their own idea about is it fast enough or is it not or are enough people using this thing or are they not right um so yeah ultimately getting to um more like trackable numbers is like it's tough it's it's tough because like you have to make a case that like hey this is like the right uh this is like the right cadence for this thing to be successful right like you got to get alignment on that um but then also there's there's just like the product analytics muscle you have to build and like getting getting your amplitude or metabase or whatever to to be able to like accurately report on those things as well so There's a lot that goes into it. I'm not trying to come here and say, oh, it's so easy. Just start using Vistily and everything's going to be great. Even in our own tree, we don't have numbers to everything because we're not sure what the right number to put to it is. And we're not even tracking it accurately enough, even if we had the exact idea for how we want to track it. So it's tough, but it's something you iterate on over time. you know just like the value the value of just like getting all those assumptions out there is is so um it's so high that it's a worthwhile exercise anyway yeah i think that the my experience has always been and maybe it's the like i wouldn't say it's 80 20 i'd probably say like 60 maybe if i had the gut put it on it 60 of the value is getting the the thing mapped out at least for your area And that's mapped out without putting like hard numbers against it. Like that's just words and hypotheses and like assumptions mapped out as what we believe to be the drivers to each other's. You're going to get like 60 odd percent of the way just with that. And the reason for that is because now you can clearly articulate those assumptions and hypotheses. You can create alignment. You can tell a story. You can rationalize and defend why you're doing certain things. So like we're focused on this opportunity because it links to these. these outcomes right these business outcomes or whatnot right um but then the rest of the value is then all the fine tuning which is probably the the which would take time and it's much harder but if you can get there it's it's it's huge because now we actually have and this is like when you get into this position i say with my clients like when they get there it's a huge unlock like not only are we having robust conversations about do we focus on like like it's back to that lever points right when you can map to space out you're now when it comes to strategy and stuff you're having really robust conversations it's not it's not people's opinions and stuff it's like well um it's back to what i said before well the best incremental improvement that i that we've had in conversion like that client right like is 0.3 percent like are we just going to keep chasing 0.3 percent for like the next couple of years or are we going to start looking elsewhere because i'm looking over here and churn seems high and this isn't this isn't good like i think we could we could go there and again you move away from opinion you work towards work towards data and that type of stuff and then you can then you can back it up too okay we did these things did they achieve what we thought they would did they end up and you can work your way off the chain okay did that have an impact on the next layer up yes or no okay yes did it have an impact on the next layer up yes or no and and etc yes as much as it is like a top down exercise of breaking things down it's also like over time a bottoms up exercise because as you you're you're really starting with these hypotheses of what are the drivers of growth and over time you'll learn oh maybe this isn't as important and this is a lot more important than we originally thought um and so you know over over time the the things down down the tree tend to change as you just get more clarity um i want to jump into question which was about mapping these to like lead in action hypotheses to test internal teams owners of kpis um i just want to i'll start you you can jump in after after two steve like yeah i think the short answer is yes i mean we started getting down to that level one of the things that was really nice uh that steve had up before was on when you start to map this out exactly what you have here with the hypotheses and steve just mentioned to it is like what what's nice about actually going through this exercise is mapping out those assumptions and hypotheses right so like on some of those boxes what steve had was like it was like a proxy measure for blah so that's like the hypothesis so the reason why we care about this this thing is because we believe something and that's just framed as a proxy metric right so this is a proxy for value right if customers are doing this then we believe they're getting some core value out of the product and absolutely you can test that absolutely you can also get very low level all the way down to like here's a hypothesis on a solution against an opportunity and you can test that you can map it to teams i think this is the power powerful thing of this this like doing these types of activity and like this is a great tool for it but like even if you have to use it do it in like a mirror board or a whiteboard or something the powerful thing is doing it we just wanted to use like show you show you a real example the the powerful thing is doing it and then as steve said actually getting everybody on the same page about some of those those drivers and stuff and then you can assign owners too you'll be like okay well you own this area and i own this area and yeah and then we both contribute to blah right yeah i don't know what you got to happen yeah no i i love all that like just the idea that especially when you're earlier early on a lot of the you don't know you don't know like from like a mathematical standpoint like what specific usage is uh or like points of value are going to drive growth or attention or attention um and so they really are hypotheses that you have to get you got to get kind of alignment on with the rest of the team and that's totally fine um yeah and vistally supports being able to like um you know call these things out as hypotheses and and like kind of run tests and ultimately over time you'll you'll do some experiments around hey if we if we do this better if we do this thing better is it going to increase the amount of people that are using this part of the product or if people use this part of the product more is it actually gonna uh increase retention um and then and that's fine i think that's just like part of the job right like part of part of being a pm is just like working with uncertainty and yeah like at the end of the at the end of the day it goes back to what we were talking about earlier like business growth all the way at the top is such like a multi-factor thing right and so but and still as a pm it's your job to kind of have an opinion around like what are the things that contribute to that and then help your team like experiment your way through like validating through some of those hypotheses so yeah i think it's you made me think it's also a really good this is a good activity to build your business acumen to so if you're trying to be more strategic as we mentioned before uh come across as more strategic to be able to influence better in the organization but even just to try and understand the business side more this is a great activity because it's going to force you to try and understand that value exchange and how your product or your space fits into the broader picture and how everything links together. And if you can't map it out and you get stuck in places, it's probably a good place to start in terms of your own learning. So maybe if you're gonna stuck somewhere, go start talking to people, try and connect the dots, try to understand how that bridges. Like, you might get to a point where you're like, okay, I understand how this product helps our customers. but i don't really understand how we make money off it as an example so then cool let's go try and work that out and then you'll be able to link those things together and it's going to help you understand the business better build your business acumen so i think it's great in that regard so yes i would say we've seen so we've run these like kpi tree mapping sessions uh with people and it's like night and day difference between when you know if we just if we're just running it with one like senior product manager verse you know, them bringing like maybe the CEO or like the head of product, maybe someone from marketing as well, like having a handful of people together and like running this session, there's often just like so many things going on around the business that maybe you're not aware of, or, you know, people just have different viewpoints about how things work. And so running this as a session with multiple people, I think is a great way to get I don't know, just get to like a better, more useful model. Peter had a question about connecting opportunity solution trees to the KPI tree. I mean, the answer is absolutely yes. I don't know if you wanted to show the thing again. Yeah, yeah, I can. Here, let me present again. Yeah, I think honestly, it's one of, it's one of like my favorite parts of Vistily is it kind of like combines these two ideas of like creating clarity about what are our levers and then taking that and going to okay great now let's try and solve this um this is a different workspace it's like a little bit more fleshed out this is just like a demo workspace but it really kind of highlights um your question a little bit um so similar similar like top of the tree uh like structure right annual recurring revenue new revenue retained revenue um there's like a demo company for like a meeting recorder bot um and so the idea for them is like cool conversion rate is a function of like um you know how uh how well customers are inviting a couple colleagues linking their calendar completing one of the generated like action items from like the meeting bot right and so you can invistily you can say you can like look across these and say oh okay cool of these like inputs into our conversion rate from like free trial to paying customer like this one this one is like really not performing as well as some of the other inputs so we want to create an outcome around this which is basically a goal like ideally it's like uh i don't know if you've read jeff gotthell's book around like who does what by how much but i think it's one of the best ways like structure your goals um but like so we have this kpi and have this outcome which is our goal for like increasing this kpi by a certain amount over a certain amount of time and then you can kind of take that and say okay cool Given this goal, like what you have your opportunity solution tree under it, right? It's like, what are the problems that we might solve for users that are going to help us hit this outcome? And so yeah, this supports like the entire, like opportunity solution tree process. Yeah, when I talked about earlier, like, you know, at the end of the day, this is like kind of this mind mapping tool that's structured in a way that product teams would want it to be. like one of the coolest things we have these kind of like workflows invisibly for running um running discovery interviews with customers and also like aggregating feedback from um sales support success or even if you're talking to customers and you can actually tie bits of like um tie these like learnings uh to to the opportunities uh which really helps to um like it like at some point you're you're gonna like do some discovery and figure out what all the opportunities are at some point you're gonna have to like kind of prioritize okay which one of these should we solve first and having all of that like first party hey what are people actually saying about this problem right on the opportunity makes it a lot easier for you to like have an opinion about like how how big of an opportunity is this really so yeah really all the all the things that go into an opportunity solution tree and all of like the different like data that you might want to collect about it or even doing like if you do like some form of like rice um it kind of supports all of that uh natively so yeah and i think um one thing that i i hope we've probably illustrated i feel like i'm emphasizing it seven different ways in this time but i think it's so important is like this is like this as a skill and being able to do this is so powerful and so important and back to like what steve said before i'm also amazed at how many product teams and i and i said product team generally because it's it's it's other roles like you mentioned design and stuff before but it's also i give probably the other roles a bit more grace but definitely from a product perspective it's like how do you not know how these things connect but it's it does still amaze me at how and even like i've talked to senior stakeholders and leaders and stuff inside businesses and they can't even map it out either right and it's almost like how do you know that you're focusing on the most important things how do you know that the things that you're working on are the highest leverage are you like that client just use that example again that you're just like like tunnel vision in on conversion conversion conversion you're getting incremental 0.3% gains and you're just totally missing some other opportunity or some other potential area that is totally untapped that if you put half the energy into you could get 10 times the results right yeah yeah I go back and forth on this like having co-founded companies in the past I think my brain is just you know pre-wired to think more in terms of like how do things ultimately like ladder up to revenue um but then there's another part of me that's like well when when would people have like learned this skill because you're right it is a skill that takes practice and and like true like i feel like most product companies don't they just don't work in this way at all so when would they have learned it right like most most product managers are like oh i own i just own this area of the product and i kind of talk to users and solve some problems around it um but yeah this is like my domain and so like like why would they you know have been trained on that or you know uh when would they have been exposed to that right it's not like we're getting degrees in product management where we learn these things right like we're all kind of just figuring out as we go along and hopefully we go to webinars like these and read some books and kind of learn uh you know learn some new skills um but yeah i think there's still so much that people like like you and others can do to just like really help uh you know get these get these ideas out there and and help people kind of start to wrap their head around it yeah i mean i totally agree i mean i approach it with that mentality too i have i have a lot of um patience and sympathy for them because it's like No, just nobody showed them. And it is a skill. It's not easy. Probably last question, because I'm looking at the time as well. Question about linking. Do you have any examples that you can share linking this to a roadmap? Yeah, I can show this again. So Visily, these things in Visily actually can like pivot into a roadmap, which is nice. Pavan, I got to Venmo you for giving me a bunch of opportunities to show off why Visily is so cool. uh so these like yeah yeah i know right um yeah it's it's actually my co-founder under a pseudonym in there um so there's these like statuses on things in your um in like the opportunity solution tree portion of it right and they have these like now next later statuses on it um this is just like another way that like vistally is um it's you know it's a mind mapping tool that's structured in a way that product teams would want um so all these things can actually we'll actually pivot into a and sorry there's like some dummy data in here it's just like a demo instance um but like all of this stuff pivots into a now next later roadmap um and there's yeah a handful of improvements coming up on this um being able to like kind of like swim lane this by by outcome and a handful of other things that are going to make it really easy to kind of report on hey we made all these decisions in vistally um Now we want to kind of like take that and use it as a tool to talk to the rest of the team or even just kind of use it internally in the product team to kind of like track progress on across these things. And one of the things that I think is really cool about it is it kind of like commingles solutions and opportunities. And so I think it's really it's great as you're like working on stuff to like call it the solution it is. but as you think about like planning for things in the future i think it's super helpful to talk about it in terms of like the problem you want to solve um just so that you don't get like too like pre-anchored to a solution for something that maybe you haven't done enough discovery on or enough like usability testing on or things like that um so you can kind of co-mingle opportunities and solutions in your opportunity solution tree or in your roadmap sorry for me ultimately like kpi trees and that type of tool is really to help you drive decision making and it's for you to find those lever points is what i always think about like what is the highest leverage thing for us to do as a company and you kind of going through all of these trying to find them and and then the other thing that is useful for is also breaking breaking it down to something specific that you can actually influence and you can earn and you can control ultimately that format is not a roadmap and it can't be because a roadmap now needs sequencing and you're not worried about sequencing in that in that regard you're more worried about decision making at that point in time but then that's where you do the translation and you're like okay well if we're prioritizing these outcomes because that's what we think is the highest leverage thing okay how what opportunities exist how are we going to solve that and that can be turned into into a roadmap ultimately yes yeah yeah uh yeah i think one of the things i love about this is it's like it helps you take this like great way to frame your thinking kpi trees and opportunity solution trees and then like operationalize it into like the other things you have to do as a product manager right turn it into a roadmap turn it into like a report that you are um maybe you're like you know doing like a one-on-one with your boss and like saying oh here's my we do okayers and here's my key result here's the things i'm working on um this like because it's like structured um it has uh the ability to kind of like turn your opportunity solution tree and your kpi trees like into those things so you're not trying to use you know 20 different tools to to kind of do all of that so so yeah cool we are over time i appreciate i appreciate everyone coming out and hopefully hopefully that was valuable to you i think this is such an underrated skill it does take time to develop i would encourage you to start to do it i think being able to do this should, and I'm willing to kind of like, you can hold me to it. So you can hit me up if it doesn't do this, but doing this well would definitely change the way that you think and you approach product. And it should change the way that you can, how influential you are as well inside of an organization. And then huge shout out to you, Steve. I know it's super early in the morning for you. You had to do a crazy round trip and everything. But yeah, amazing. I appreciate you taking us, taking the time and taking us through this. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I love talking about this stuff. So happy to get up early and chat about it. If anyone wants some help getting started with something like this, just hit me up on LinkedIn and super helpful with things like this as well. So yeah, hit us up and we'd be happy to run a session with you or just kind of talk you through some of the finer points of it.

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DESCRIPTION
Too many product teams are giving vague and high level business outcomes that they cannot impact. In this month's Product Pathways webinar, Steve Klein co-founder of Vistaly and Ant Murphy walk through a live demo on how you can use KPIs trees to break down business outcomes into what truly matters!

Key takeaways: 
- KPI trees can help Product Managers break down high level outcomes into something that's specific that they can control/influence
- Break outcomes down between Business → Product → User
- KPI Trees help you find your highest leverage points
- Start with Hypotheses, Not Perfect Metrics
- Doing this can make you a better story teller
- Connect your KPI Trees to Opportunity Solution Trees


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TIMESTAMPS:
[0:00] Coming Up
[00:20] Introduction
[00:51] Steve Klein, Co-founder Vistaly
[02:59] Live example: Breaking down vague business outcomes
[08:12] Be seen as a strategic PM
[09:51] Live example: KPI Tree to OST
[17:04] Prioritizing outcomes
[22:49] Storytelling
[27:01] Tips for building KPI Trees
[31:12] Common Challenges
[38:20] Hypotheses
[43:48] Connecting Opportunity Solution Trees to KPI Trees
[50:01] OST to Product Roadmap
[53:11] Final thoughts

p.s. This wasn't a sponsored webinar or anything. I'm am however an advisor for Vistaly but the goal was to use a real example to demonstrate how this all works!