What metrics or KPIs do you feel are important for a product owner to track?

Remember to focus your response on the basic metrics your interviewer is likely to be familiar with. This question is intended to test your knowledge of tracking the health of a product, the impact a product has on high-level business goals, and the performance of a Scrum team over time. Discussion of metrics that are overly specific to a particular team or line of business may confuse your interviewer.

I am interested in the velocity of the team and how well we are tracking towards a minimally viable product release or a release plan milestone. I sometimes track the difference between the estimation for a story and the actual level of effort required to deliver it. I use this information to plan and identify trends for discussion in sprint retrospective meetings.

At the product level, I ensure we have metrics to track the health of the product. This may include tracking active user counts, query counts, page views, product downtime, user errors, integration failures, etc. I use metrics to understand usage and growth over time and identify technical issues the team needs to address. Additionally, I look at end-user support metrics to ensure that issues are resolved appropriately.

On the business side, I develop KPIs that indicate how well the solutions are developed to meet the specific goals of the business. This might include tracking metrics like marketing campaign success rate, changes in revenue, a reduction in time spent on a particular operating task, or an improvement in data accuracy. I also do market trend analysis to ensure that the goals we select will drive the kinds of results my clients are interested in.