Product Operating Model KPIs and Metrics to Measure Success

Since product operating model success can’t be measured by internal efficiency metrics, departmental KPIs, or operational excellence, you’ll need a new framework of measurement that focuses on outcomes. Consider the best practices in this section as you build a measurement scheme for your organization’s unique priorities.

Aligning metrics with business objectives

Your metrics must be aligned to business objectives so that these objectives are directly linked to technical activities. With this link, you will enable the improved decision-making and resource allocation that you’re striving for with a product development operating model.

In Planview’s 2024 Project to Product State of the Industry report, we found that elite organizations – those that meet their quarterly business objectives more than 90% of the time – are 3x more likely to use cascading Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to connect enterprise business goals to product-area objectives, while also measuring Flow Metrics® to track efficiency and effectiveness of work moving through value streams.

Balancing leading and lagging indicators

Next, choose an array of metrics that balances leading and lagging indicators. If you incorporate both types of metrics into your product operating model measurement framework, you’ll have a better overview for decision-making. You’ll want to see both predictive indicators (leading), including NPS scores, sprint velocity, or sales pipeline metrics, and historical metrics (lagging), including revenue, bug resolution time, or customer support tickets.

Creating a cadence for measurement and review

Once metrics are established, monitor them methodically. Develop a structured, regular rhythm for monitoring, analyzing, and acting on product performance. We recommend adopting these cadences (Table 1) and methods for review (Table 2).

Table 1. Measuring and Reviewing a Product Operating Model: Key Components

Table 2. Measuring and Reviewing a Product Operating Model: Implementation Best Practices

Planview’s capabilities for creating holistic measurement frameworks

Planview integrates three essential measurement capabilities to provide comprehensive organizational visibility. Organizations can define and track Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to measure progress toward strategic goals, while Value Stream Analytics monitors the health and performance of product value streams through Flow Metrics and business outcomes.

At the high level, or portfolio level, consolidated insights give executives a holistic view of performance across multiple value streams, including rolled-up metrics and business results that drive strategic decision-making.

NatWest Group increases funding speed by 5x, saves $20M

NatWest Group connects strategy to delivery by using OKRs at multiple levels – strategic, portfolio, and program, with an annual investment of about $1B. They keep track of all these moving parts with the help of Planview, which Steve Marjot, Head of Change Centre of Excellence refers to as “…our golden source data for the portfolio.”

Over time, NatWest has deactivated 85+ legacy systems and developer tools, seen a 5x increase in funding speed, and saved approximately $20M annually.

Strategic portfolio metrics provide a birds eye view of how effectively you’re managing your entire portfolio, which enables faster strategic planning and execution under the product operating model.

Resource allocation effectiveness

Goal of metric: Ensure the organization can execute on product vision and strategy while maintaining existing products and services.

What is measured:

• How well teams and budgets are distributed across strategic initiatives, as opposed to maintenance work
• How well this resource distribution aligns with strategic priorities

Portfolio health and balance

Goal of metric: Maintain sustainable growth while managing risk and innovation across the product portfolio.

What is measured:

• The mix of projects across different time horizons (now/next/future)
• The mix across risk levels (sure bets vs. innovative experiments)

Investment vs. return analysis

Goal of metric: Validate investment decisions and optimize future resource allocation across products.

What is measured: How actual ROI (including both financial metrics and strategic value created) compares against forecasted returns for each initiative

Planview’s portfolio visualization and analytics features

Planview offers comprehensive portfolio visualization and analytics features for effective project portfolio management. The platform includes customizable dashboards with real-time metrics and KPIs, plus strategic planning tools for investment and scenario modeling.

With built-in reporting, data visualization, and portfolio optimization capabilities, users can perform a variety of functions from scenario analysis and resource planning to risk assessments. The solution also provides financial management features to support data-driven decision making: budget tracking, forecasting, and ROI visualization.

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UPS strategy execution is centered in a single source of truth

For UPS, the biggest challenge has been deciding where to invest, where to pull investments, and how to govern it all. The need for better, not bigger, governance reflected the larger need for a solution to achieving and maintaining alignment across global portfolios.​

With Planview supporting their product operating model, UPS now has a single source of truth. This has enabled strategy and investment planning, transparency in execution process support, financial management of investments, and enterprise governance support. Executive leadership now has near real-time access to the status of ongoing initiatives, and at a glance, they can quickly determine if they are on track, behind, or ahead of schedule.

Use value stream metrics to optimize your entire product development process, starting with ideas and ending with customer delivery.

Flow Metrics and value stream efficiency

Goal of metric: Optimize the entire product development chain, ensuring efficient delivery of customer value.

What is measured: How work moves through the development process, identifying any bottlenecks and waste

Cycle time and lead time measurements

Goal of metric: Set reliable delivery expectations and identify opportunities to speed up product development.

What is measured:

• Cycle time: How long it takes to get from work initiation to completion
• Lead time: How long it takes to get from customer request to delivery

Value delivery rate and predictability

Goal of metric: Ensure reliable, continuous value delivery and a sustainable pace for teams.

What is measured: How consistently and quickly valuable features and improvements can be delivered to customers

Planview’s value stream management solution for measuring flow

Planview’s value stream management solution measures and optimizes software delivery flow through Flow Metrics. This could include:

• Flow Time (average time to complete work items)
• WIP/Flow Load® (average number of concurrent work items)
• Throughput/Flow Velocity (average items completed over time)

The solution provides visibility into value streams and enables data-driven improvements, powered by high-performance connectors that sync data in less than one minute. This integration backbone helps organizations automate data exchanges, maintain complex workstreams, and improve collaboration across their entire product development ecosystem.

BMW Group used Planview’s data synchronization capabilities to launch faster

With vehicles containing millions of lines of code, BMW’s IT department needed to become faster and more innovative while maintaining quality. They faced challenges with manual data tracking across their Agile toolchain and needed to replicate their German plant’s success in a new Chinese market.

Planview provided data integration for BMW’s control unit development, ensuring consistency in Agile toolchains and enabling data synchronization between Germany and China. This allowed engineering to run simulations successfully, exceeding initial expectations in China.

“Today we can integrate different software products with each other much more quickly than before and at the same time we are able to gain new insights from our data and use them to become better and faster.” — Senior IT project lead, BMW Group

As a result, BMW now integrates software delivery tools efficiently, synchronizes data, and uses value stream insights to improve processes. Teams can now identify improvements independently and deliver features faster. What’s more, BMW synchronized massive amounts of data with their Chinese joint venture, completing it one full year ahead of plan.

Agile product development metrics work together to provide a comprehensive view of how effective an organization’s agile development practices are. This view enables product organizations using the product operating model to continuously improve their delivery capabilities and maintain healthy team structures and dynamics.

Sprint and release metrics

Goal of metric: Provide real-time feedback on team execution and maintain predictable delivery cycles.

What is measured:

• Completion rates
• Scope changes
• Quality metrics within sprints and releases

Product backlog health

Goal of metric: Ensure teams are working on the right things at the right time and maintaining a healthy pipeline of future work.

What is measured:

• Backlog refinement quality
• Story point distribution
• Prioritization effectiveness

Team velocity and capacity utilization

Goal of metric: Optimize team performance and ensure sustainable, predictable delivery of product value.

What is measured: Team output consistency, workload balance, and resource utilization across sprints

How Planview integrates agile metrics with higher-level portfolio insights

Planview redefines how work gets done in the product operating model through personalized views that highlight insights, performance, and potential risks. Organizations can break down data silos with comprehensive visibility across strategy, planning, and delivery data. Users engage in a streamlined experience tailored to their specific information needs, such as:

• Creating unique views based on data-oriented use cases to pinpoint focus areas, address issues, and mitigate risks
• Enabling data and insight transparency across all decisions and decision-makers within the organization
• Enhancing productivity through single-screen capabilities to action, investigate, respond, and react with one click

Nationwide Building Society adapts to change quickly while maintaining value delivery

In response to the digital revolution and increasing competitive pressures in the financial sector, Nationwide Building Society recognized the need to transform how they aligned business outcomes from strategy to delivery. By implementing Planview, they moved away from siloed systems toward an integrated, transparent approach that gave them complete organizational visibility.

This enabled Nationwide to shift from rigid project structures to dynamic product delivery, while adopting a more cost-efficient continuous funding model. The transformation helped them quickly adapt to change while maintaining their commitment to sustainable value delivery in an uncertain economic climate.

These metrics measure the real-world impact of product decisions, helping your organization understand how well your products are meeting customer needs and driving business growth under the product operating model.

Customer acquisition and retention metrics

Goal of metric: Validate product-market fit and ensure sustainable business growth through customer loyalty.

What is measured:

• New customer growth
• Churn rates
• Customer lifetime value

Feature adoption and usage analytics

Goal of metric: Provide direct feedback on feature value and guide future product development priorities.

What is measured: How customers interact with specific features, including adoption rates and engagement patterns

Customer satisfaction and NPS

Goal of metric: Indicate product effectiveness in solving customer problems and maintaining market competitiveness.

What is measured: Overall customer happiness through:

• Satisfaction scores
• Net Promoter Score
• Qualitative feedback

Planview’s capabilities for connecting customer feedback to development priorities

Planview offers key features to help organizations turn customer feedback into delivered value. The platform provides OKR tracking capabilities that create direct links between customer objectives and delivery outcomes – key to the product operating model. Flow Metrics give teams visibility into the speed and efficiency of customer request fulfillment, while value stream visualization maps the complete journey from initial customer requests through final delivery.

These integrated capabilities enable teams to make data-driven decisions about customer-focused work.

It equips development teams, who can accurately monitor their speed and capacity, while also empowering product managers, who gain the insights needed to prioritize the most valuable customer initiatives. With clear visibility into both customer needs and team capabilities, organizations can strategically adjust resource allocation to ensure customer priorities receive proper attention and drive business results.

These metrics connect product performance to business outcomes, ensuring your product decisions align with overall company financial health and growth objectives.

Revenue and growth metrics

Goal of metric: Demonstrate the direct business impact of product strategies and validate market success.

What is measured:

• Product revenue streams
• Growth rates
• Market share indicators

Cost and efficiency metrics

Goal of metric: Optimize spending and ensure sustainable product development practices.

What is measured:

• Development costs
• Operational efficiency
• Resource utilization rates

ROI and time-to-value measurements

Goal of metric: Guide investment decisions and prioritize initiatives that deliver the most value in the shortest time.

What is measured:

• Return on product investments
• How quickly new features generate value under the product operating model

Planview’s financial planning and analysis capabilities within portfolio management

Planview’s financial planning and analysis capabilities provide comprehensive portfolio management through integrated top-down financial planning, initiative tracking, and benefits realization. Organizations can cascade financials across functional areas – including capital expenses, operating expenses, revenue tracking, and burn rate analysis – while monitoring both planned and actual costs.

The platform enables multiple scenario planning options, allowing teams to model different investment approaches, analyze trade-offs, and understand impacts of funding changes across the portfolio.

Planview Copilot enhances these financial capabilities by providing instant, natural language access to financial data and trends. Teams can quickly surface hidden insights about resource utilization and investment performance, while receiving AI-driven recommendations for portfolio optimization.

The system analyzes vast amounts of financial and operational data to identify risks, suggest resource reallocation opportunities, and provide data-driven guidance for strategic investment decisions. This combination of robust financial planning tools and AI-powered analysis helps organizations make faster, more informed decisions about where to invest resources for maximum business impact.

These metrics ensure the technical foundation of products in the product operating model remains strong and sustainable, balancing speed of delivery with system reliability and security.

Deployment frequency and stability

Goal of metric: Assess the team’s ability to reliably deliver updates and maintain system stability.

What is measured: How often code is deployed and the success rate of those deployments

Technical debt measurement

Goal of metric: Balance short-term delivery with long-term product sustainability and maintenance costs.

What is measured:

• Code quality
• System complexity
• Maintenance needs

Security and compliance metrics

Goal of metric: Ensure products meet security requirements and maintain customer trust while managing organizational risk.

What is measured:

• Security vulnerabilities
• Compliance status
• Niveaux de risque

Planview’s integration with DevOps tools and metrics visualization

Planview integrates with Microsoft Azure DevOps Server and other DevOps tools to provide comprehensive visibility into software delivery processes. Specifically, Planview:

• Connects to Azure DevOps Server to access work items, source control, and Agile project management data
• Visualizes and analyzes software delivery lifecycle data
• Provides Flow Metrics features that collect data from various sources and present it in a centralized dashboard
• Includes Flow Item Analyzer for viewing all open and completed artifacts
• Features Flow Optimizer to identify waste and ensure consistent modeling across value streams

The integration capabilities through Planview offer:

• Near real-time synchronization (less than one minute)
• High-performance, low-impact connectors
• Model-based integration with reusable configuration settings
• Operational stability while maintaining tool connectivity

This combined approach helps organizations visualize their software delivery processes while maintaining reliable data synchronization across their DevOps toolchain.

These comparative metrics help organizations assess their operating model effectiveness and identify opportunities for improvement based on industry best practices.

Planview CTO Dr. Mik Kersten, author of the best-selling book Project to Product, summarizes it this way: “A project-oriented approach focuses on funding milestones, defined project timelines, cost center metrics, and delivery of requirements. In contrast, a product-oriented approach focuses on funding value streams, product lifecycles, profit center metrics, and delivery of business value.”

Metrics for evaluating traditional vs. product models

Goal of metric: Validate the benefits of product-centric operations and identify areas for operational improvement.

What is measured: Key performance indicators between project-based and product-based approaches

Table 3. Metrics Comparison: Traditional vs. Product Operating Models

Benchmarking against industry standards

Goal of metric: Provide context for performance targets and helps identify competitive advantages or gaps to address.

What is measured: Measure performance against industry averages and best-in-class examples

Creating a Balanced Scorecard for Product Operations

A balanced scorecard approach helps organizations monitor and manage product performance across multiple dimensions of the product operating model, ensuring comprehensive oversight of product operations.

Integrating metrics across dimensions

Goal of metric: Provide a holistic perspective of product health and prevent overfocus on single metrics.

What is measured: Financial, customer, process, and learning metrics in a unified view

Visualizing performance holistically

Goal of metric: Helps teams understand how different aspects of product performance influence each other and impact overall success.

What is measured: Relationships between different metrics using dashboards and reports

Executive reporting best practices

Goal of metric: Enables data-driven decision-making at the leadership level and maintains strategic alignment.

What is measured: Key strategic metrics and trends highlighted in clear, actionable reports

Planview’s dashboard and reporting capabilities

Planview’s AI-driven platform provides comprehensive dashboard and reporting functionality that connects software delivery to business outcomes with end-to-end visibility from strategy to delivery impact. Key capabilities for a product management operating model include:

• Executive Dashboards: Customized visualizations that measure performance, track financials, and identify strategic obstacles with high-impact data presentations.
• Value Stream Insights: Proactive analytics that enable teams to pivot plans and drive on-time delivery through predictive management insights.
• Performance Analysis: Multi-dimensional analysis of initiative and program data across business capabilities, applications, products, and technologies with planned versus actual comparisons.
• Financial Management: Comprehensive CapEx/OpEx categorization, budget tracking, and variance reporting that captures portfolio-level value realization against strategic objectives.
• Outcome Measurement: Tracking of both financial and non-financial benefits achieved against plan, rolling up from individual initiatives to broader strategic objectives.
• AI-Powered Summarizers: Automated daily and weekly reporting tasks with intelligent summarization that transforms routine chores into actionable insights. Generate comprehensive summaries of risks, issues, work progress, and release notes instantly, enhancing team productivity and knowledge management through streamlined, one-click automation.

In this section, explore product operating model examples of organizations who have successfully overcome measurement hurdles.

Platform operating model metrics case study: Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada

In 2020, Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada pivoted from traditional project-centric operations to a more dynamic focus on customer journeys, platforms, and products. This strategic evolution was rooted in becoming more client-centric, with the organization transforming their PMO into a Value Realization Office (VRO) and dismantling barriers between IT and business teams.

The global implementation of Planview supported this transformation by creating a connected ecosystem where all business groups could manage value flow from strategy to delivery. Sun Life expanded their capabilities through features like Strategies and OKRs, Investment and Capacity Planning, Block funding and Agile costing, while leveraging enhanced dashboards and analytics through custom PowerBI reports to track their progress.

Enterprise transformation measurement case study: Vanguard

Also in 2020, Vanguard launched a five-year modernization initiative to transform its digital capabilities and enhance investor experiences. Under the leadership of CTO Mike Carr, the investment management firm focused on four key elements:

1. Cloud Migration: Adopted public cloud infrastructure-as-service to give developers faster resource access and greater focus on features
2. Microservice Architecture: Moved from monolithic to microservice architecture for more stable, predictable changes
3. Agile Methodology Reinforcement: Strengthened their 2006 Agile adoption with robust CI CD pipelines, training, and modern development practices
4. Product Orientation: Transitioned from project-based to permanent product teams to reduce overhead and maintain expertise

The transformation yielded impressive results: technology change rates increased five-fold while major incidents decreased by 75 %. Customer satisfaction improved as Vanguard leveraged its enhanced agility to deliver investor-focused improvements.

Read the full Vanguard case study

Understand and avoid common measurement mistakes so that your organization maintains effective product operations and focuses on metrics that drive real value.

Vanity metrics vs. actionable insights

Watch out that product operating model leaders and teams don’t slip back into measuring vanity metrics. The vanity metrics (Table 4) are surface-level numbers that won’t lead to meaningful decisions. Focus on metrics that provide actionable insights (Table 4) in order to influence product strategy and outcomes.

Table 4. Comparing Vanity Metrics With Actionable Insights

Avoiding metrics overload

While you want a robust set of metrics measuring success, stay focused on what truly matters for the success of your product platform operating model. Narrow your focus to key performance indicators that align with strategic objectives.

Measurement anti-patterns

Evaluate metrics with a critical eye, avoiding flawed or misleading data. Use the most common mistakes (Table 5) to identify and correct common measurement misalignments.

Table 5. Mistakes and Misalignments Organizations Make

As you nudge your organization’s culture toward a measurement approach that aligns with an agile product operating model, keep these three best practices in mind:

• Outcomes over outputs: Success should be measured by customer-centric outcomes, product performance, and value delivery. If the organization measures outputs (on time, on budget) instead of outcomes, you will lack insight about the model’s true ROI, grapple with vanity metrics that don’t lead to meaningful outcomes, and deploy teams toward the wrong goals.
• Blend, don’t bifurcate: When you decide on new metrics, avoid overfocusing on either strategy or teams. Instead, focus on a blend that supports tracking both business and customer value.
• Iterate rather than finalize: Identify opportunities for continuous improvement by following this process: pick metrics, establish baselines, and measure progress at regular intervals.

If you’re ready to take the next step, explore how Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management and Value Stream Management solutions can support your product and platform operating model transformation.