A product marketer is the Chief Evangelism Officer of a product. A CEO does whatever it takes to make the company successful, and the scope of “whatever it takes” shifts every year based on what the business needs most. A great product marketer operates the same way. The job isn’t static. The metrics shouldn’t be either.
One of the most common questions I get from PMM leaders and the executives who manage them: “What should we measure?” As if there’s a universal scorecard you can pull off a shelf and apply to every product, every stage, every business context. There isn’t. Treating PMM measurement like a one-size-fits-all exercise is one of the fastest ways to misalign your team with the outcomes that actually matter.
The Three Variables That Should Drive Every PMM’s OKRs
Before you write a single OKR, answer three questions. Get these wrong and you’ll spend the year optimizing for things that don’t move the business.
1. What Stage Is Your Product In?
This is the most important variable, and the one most companies get wrong.
Early-stage means you’re in discovery mode: determining product-market fit, understanding market needs, preparing for a launch. OKRs should reflect that: qualitative customer feedback, pilot participation rates, early adoption signals, market validation milestones.
Mature product means you’re trying to beat competition, optimize pricing, defend or grow market share. OKRs shift toward competitive win rates, pricing impact on deal velocity, upsell and cross-sell influence, and share of voice.
Companies apply mature-product metrics to early-stage products and end up with revenue targets and pipeline attribution for something that hasn’t found its audience yet. That’s wishful thinking dressed up as accountability.
2. What Part of Product Marketing Do You Own?
Not every PMM owns the full spectrum. The OKRs for positioning and messaging, competitive intelligence, and sales enablement each have distinct success criteria.
- Positioning and messaging: Message resonance, win/loss themes tied to narrative, website conversion tied to positioning changes.
- Competitive intelligence: Competitive win rates, sales confidence scores on competitive deals, battlecard adoption and feedback.
- Sales enablement: Content usage and effectiveness, ramp time for new reps, deal stage progression after enablement touchpoints.
- Customer insights: Quality and volume of insights surfaced to product, customer advisory board engagement, voice-of-customer integration into roadmap decisions.
Blending these into a generic “product marketing scorecard” dilutes the signal and makes it nearly impossible to tell what’s working.
3. What Are the Business Goals This Year?
PMM teams build OKRs in isolation, disconnected from the company’s top-line priorities. If the business objective this year is geographic expansion, your OKRs should enable that: market research for new regions, localized positioning, sales enablement for teams selling into unfamiliar markets. If the priority is standing up a partner channel, your OKRs should reflect partner readiness, co-marketing programs, and channel-specific messaging.
Your OKRs should trace directly to a company-level priority. Where that line breaks, something is misaligned.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Most PMMs anchor their goals to the stage of the product life cycle. The stage dictates the work, and the work dictates what you measure.
When I launched Twilio Studio, the goals mapped directly to the product’s journey from concept to revenue:
Pilot (Awareness)
Target: 500 pilot customers
Result: 1,500+
Beta (Adoption)
Target: 4,000 new signups in the quarter
Result: 15,000+ signups in week one
GA (Revenue)
Target: Start generating revenue
Result: Revenue from day one of general availability
At the pilot stage, revenue was the wrong question entirely. The question was whether we could generate enough awareness and interest to fill a pilot program. At beta, the question shifted to adoption. At GA, it became commercial. Each phase had its own definition of success, and I retired each phase’s metrics once we moved to the next stage.
The Trap of Vanity Metrics
PMM teams highlight massive webinar attendance numbers while ignoring that none of the attendees matched their ICP. They report impressive content download volumes without tracking whether those downloads influenced a single deal. The numbers look great in a slide deck. They mean nothing to the business.
Good PMM measurement connects your work to outcomes the business actually cares about: pipeline, revenue, competitive wins, customer retention, market entry. Your OKRs should reflect that.
The Through Line
PMM measurement is a strategic exercise grounded in where your product is, what your role covers, and what the business needs from you this year.
The best PMMs build their own OKRs, grounded in the reality of their product’s lifecycle, scoped to the function they own, tied directly to the company’s most important priorities. They evolve those OKRs as the product and business evolve, because scale demands a different definition of success than launch did.