Building a Metrics Framework and North Star for Google Docs

You have just taken over Google Docs as its product manager. Which metrics would you track to know whether the product is healthy and delivering value, and how would you organize and prioritize them? ```hint Start from the job Docs does Before you list any numbers, describe what people open Docs to do, alone and with others, and what a good week with it looks like for them. Then ask which signals would show that outcome happening. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I cover consumer users, Workspace business customers or both? Their goals, and how each group ties to Google's revenue, differ. - Is the scope Docs alone, or Sheets and Slides as well? - What is the metric set for: monitoring overall health, setting next year's goal, or diagnosing a known problem? - Should web, the mobile apps and offline use be treated as one product or measured separately? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The product's purpose and its users, with a clear choice of focus such as consumer versus business, and writers versus reviewers and readers - A metric set organized by the user journey, including collaboration and the sharing loop, not just a list of counts - A north-star metric with a defined unit and time window, defended against alternatives such as documents created or time spent - Guardrails for quality and trust: performance, data loss, sharing and permission errors, abuse - How the metrics would be segmented and used to make decisions ### Follow-up Questions - New documents created per week rose sharply while documents with more than one contributor stayed flat. How do you read that? - Would time spent in Docs make a good goal for the team? Why or why not? - How would your metrics change if you owned Docs only for Workspace business customers?