How do Conversation Designers prove business value to their company?
One of the key aspects of growing and scaling a Conversation Design team is proving business value to the company. How do you go about setting KPIs for a conversation design team? What kind of KPIs have you seen to be most effective?
Unfortunately, it is still often the case that designers have to “prove” their worth (same often goes for research). One strategy to help with this is to speak the same language as your product and business teams, which is often in the form of metrics like KPIs.
First, for anyone who is not familiar with the term “KPI”: KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. These are often attached to higher-level OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results.
For example, an OKR might be “Increase customer satisfaction for music playback” and the KPIs might be:
Increase CSAT rating on mobile app to 4.0+
Gain 100k new followers on our Insta account
Increase ‘play <song> by <artist>’ task completion by 25%
Ideally, KPIs are measurable. Otherwise, how will you know you’ve succeeded? But there are a lot of ways to measure things. For example, creating an internal best practices design doc is still a measurable outcome: was the document created, or not? Hosting a quarterly design sprint that includes key stakeholders is another one. Get creative.
Now, back to the question: how do you go about setting the KPIs for a conversation design team?
Start with understanding the KPIs for your product partners. What are their goals? Ideally, your KPIs will complement and support theirs. Hopefully you all have the same high-level goals; you may just have different ideas on how to achieve them.
If possible, review the business KPIs, and share yours with your partners with an opportunity for them to provide feedback. If you feel a part of their KPIs in some way, and they feel a part of yours, you’re much more likely to get support.
It’s still fine to have your own set of KPIs that are more specific to your team’s goals, which may not always map to other ones. You may have a set of things you want your team to accomplish that aren’t necessarily reflected by the business team’s. Ideally, however, a significant portion of them will relate in some way.
Having something to point to can help showcase your team’s value. For example, if you want to spend time doing a logs analysis, and the product team doesn’t see the value, is there a KPI that’s related? Perhaps the product team has a goal to have 10% fewer P0 bugs at launch; can you show how on a previous project, logs analysis led to finding more bugs pre-production, which meant fewer bugs at launch?
Don’t go overboard on the number of OKRs and KPIs you generate each quarter. It’s better to have fewer ones that have measurable impact than a huge list of everything you’d like to accomplish. KPIs are not to do lists.
It’s not always easy to have all teams aligned, but speaking a common language and having shared goals can help. Finding a way to measure parts of your team’s work is beneficial both for your team, as well as provide important visibility outside of it.