While many in the tech community have been predicting some kind of economic downturn for some time, few of us thought it would come from a global pandemic. In response, everyone’s revising their goals for 2020, and defining, achieving and communicating success will be a major test for company leaders and their teams over the coming months.
We checked in with seven New York City techies to see how their goals have changed — and which yardsticks they’ll use to measure success.
First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
We were planning to kick off a fundraising effort around the middle of this year. With a comfortable runway and a few key milestones in the works, this timeline gave us space to deliver on some exciting progress and time to find ideal partners without any runway concerns.
The economic instability due to the COVID-19 pandemic has required us to reconsider our assumptions around fundraising and our related metrics and targets. Although it’s hard to know where the market will be a few months from now, there is a reasonable possibility that venture investments will be down across the board. We could also face slower initial adoption of our core login solution through our developer portal, which we launched in a preview version last week.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
To adapt to this new situation, we first adjusted the timelines we had previously set for hitting certain milestones and KPI targets. We didn’t lower the number of new users we plan to get onboarded onto the platform, but we moved up the launch date and reconfigured development priorities to give us more time to reach that target. We also lowered our projected conversion rate, which set a new target for the size of audience we need to engage to hit our goals.
Similarly, we adjusted our financial projections to include a potential later close to the round. The first step in ensuring that we had set realistic goals was recognizing the need to preemptively adjust those goals. Because our business is not directly seeing an impact from COVID-19 today, we might have just kept our previous targets and timelines. By recognizing the future risks and uncertainties, we were able to adjust expectations and take actions now that would put us in a better position in the future.
We also recognized that there is a zero-sum relationship when it comes to our employees’ time and priorities. You can’t increase KPI targets or move up timelines without identifying ways to make room for those changes. We reviewed our more minor initiatives and goals and trimmed or deprioritized where necessary.
...We have reevaluated our budget to find opportunities to maintain the runway we had previously projected...”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
To achieve an earlier launch of our developer portal preview, we identified non-essential functionality and UI improvements that had been planned for the initial launch but that could be delayed for future releases. With the goals of the preview phase being initial feedback and establishing an early-adopter community, we determined that this trade-off was acceptable since our early users were expecting an experience still in development.
We are also considering utilizing marketing channels and campaigns now that we had slotted for later in the product rollout. This would enable us to reach a larger audience earlier if we do end up seeing an impact on conversations.
Finally, in response to the possible change in our fundraising date, we have reevaluated our budget to find opportunities to maintain the runway we had previously projected by the next round. Luckily, the cancellation of a few events we had been planning to sponsor this spring made that easier.
First, tell us a bit about what’s changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
COVID-19 has thrown everyone back into planning mode. Whatever you thought you would be working on is no longer the case. For us, our marketing strategy all year was specifically about getting our team to be face-to-face with clients, whether that would be at industry conferences or our own planned events. That strategy needed to be completely rerouted, so we shifted from thinking about cost-per-interaction and lead-to-in-person-meeting rates to actually shifting to a largely content-based strategy. Email open rates, click rates, download rates and email-to-meeting rates are what we’re looking at more closely.
Our unique position in the market right now — plus the data we have about grocery shopper habits — means we’re able to cull that data and derive insights that help our clients. That’s really what we want to produce and measure right now, more than leads generated or anything more top-of-funnel.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
Honestly, we’re still in the process of identifying what success looks like in the current climate. I think everyone — us and our clients — are trying to figure out how to move forward with marketing when there’s a global crisis going on. No one wants to be overtly promotional, but we all want to find some way to move forward as much as we can. That’s why our stance has been to provide valuable data and insights to clients. When in doubt, facts can help us try to understand where to go next. Success is largely anecdotal right now. Yes, we like to see engagement and open rates with what we’re producing, but a client saying “Thank you. You gave us some great food for thought and we’re circulating internally,” is what we’re really after right now.
...There’s also a fair bit of product development underway and repackaging of our solutions.”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
Our marketing department is all hands on deck for content production. Our client services team is playing a role in helping us glean insights from data that they’re familiar with. Our sellers are actively helping us understand what sort of answers we can share with clients. Our product and engineering teams are jumping in to tweak reports and get us closer to what we’re after. There’s also a fair bit of product development underway and repackaging of our solutions. For example, the cancellation of March Madness throws months of media planning into a tailspin for our food marketer clients. We’re trying to show how we can help with best practices for how to use recipes to reach shoppers or adjustments to copy and creative that are respectful of consumers’ anxieties right now.
First, tell us a bit about what’s changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
Between our offices in New York and Tel Aviv, we morphed into a fully remote organization overnight. This actually allowed our company to develop new efficiencies, but some of our customers in industries such as sports or travel were hit hard. So we made our KPIs even more customer-centric and support-driven, in addition to adding new features, community tools, documentation and webinars to increase self-service capabilities while growing our strategic partnerships with cloud leaders.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
Once all in-person meetings were canceled, we doubled down on the customer experience, despite our already high benchmarks in support and pricing. We focused on KPIs such as average response time, satisfaction ratings, customer retention rates and other metrics that track the customer experience. We also adjusted our KPIs to reflect a longer sales cycle, setting realistic goals by factoring in increased time to close while giving extra weight to renewals and upselling KPIs.
Our marketing team is focusing exclusively on digital channels in this online-only world...”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
Our marketing team is focusing exclusively on digital channels in this online-only world, generating more inbound leads so we can cast a wide net. This includes producing valuable digital content every day, such as blogs, ebooks, webinars and social posts. The customer success team also launched “Rivery Community,” an online forum for existing customers to ask support questions, share tips and outline use cases.
First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
The key change is simple: greater uncertainty. While we haven’t seen a major direct impact in our client relationships in the last few days and weeks, it has introduced a cloud of uncertainty about what the coming weeks and months will hold. It has impacted our KPIs to shift from top-line growth to managing profitability and preserving cash in the business to ride out this situation.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
Given the uncertainty, we have shortened our KPI cycles. Instead of looking out over the entire year, we are focusing on weeks and months. We can’t control this uncertainty, so we find it’s better to focus on managing the present and taking things in small, measured steps. This focus helps our teams reduce stress about the future and take care of what is in front of them. That’s all we feel we can really do right now.
There can be a tendency in these situations to overreact and throw out strategic planning you have spent a lot of hard work generating.”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
While we have shifted our focus of KPIs from top line to bottom line, we have specifically emphasized not making wholesale changes to how we run the business. There can be a tendency in these situations to overreact and throw out strategic planning you have spent a lot of hard work generating. We are sticking with our plan but adjusting to our new normal as a distributed company. We have found this stability to be a calming effect during this period of uncertainty.
First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
As we’ve adapted to the new reality brought on by COVID-19, we’ve transitioned to a fully remote U.S. and European workforce, as have many of our clients — a significant change from our normal, in which our executives travel all over the world for meetings and speaking engagements. Despite the shifting global business environment, we remain committed to our sales goals, as we’ve also seen an increase in the interest in and need for the work we do as biopharma takes on the pandemic. Real-world evidence can support our customers and partners as they tackle COVID-19 directly and, beyond that, support efficient research and development efforts for other treatments.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
Given COVID-19 uncertainties, we’ve modeled a range of potential future scenarios and are monitoring for key signposts that will serve as early indicators of impact on our business. Our KPIs have always reflected the impact Aetion can have on our clients and their business objectives through our collaboration, and we continue to ensure we are focusing and prioritizing our resources where our clients need them the most.
We are indexing more heavily on digital engagement...”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
While we remain committed to our key goals, we’re shifting the strategies we employ to help us reach them. We are indexing more heavily on digital engagement and focusing additional attention on work to support teams that may be facing R&D constraints. We also see increased opportunity to educate customers as they adjust their strategy and have taken care to ensure they’re prepared to tackle challenges that may lie ahead.
First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your OKRs?
PhotoShelter went fully remote in early March as we saw this crisis developing in real time in NYC. We manage our business by OKRs and have remained laser-focused on sticking to them. They guide our work across the entire organization, no matter where we are working.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your OKRs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
The most significant OKR adjustment has been to deprioritize some non-essential projects so we can focus on delivering product innovation and launches. These are designed to empower remote collaboration and workflow enhancement for creative teams who are working from home. Having visibility into all of our key projects allowed the management team an easy method to quickly align our work through Zoom calls and Hangouts when we went remote.
We have surged all development and engineering resources toward delivering three major product launches...”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new OKRs?
We have surged all development and engineering resources toward delivering three major product launches — API development, a social collaboration tool and a new enterprise solution — in April to meet the needs of our customers and prospects. Speed to market is the defining principle we are operating under right now.
First, tell us a bit about what's changed for your business in recent days? How has that impacted your KPIs?
Having the entire team go remote has definitely been a challenge. We are making sure to keep structured team meetings to keep the conversation going internally. We are now required to define fixed internal meetings and key deliverables. Conversations and tracking of deliverables are now much more organized; it is no longer about walking over to a teammate's desk to discuss a concept. We make sure to keep daily and weekly recurring meetings to keep the team in the loop.
In light of this, how have you adjusted your KPIs? How did you determine these were realistic goals for your team?
We are fortunate to have been working on a product that will benefit people while they try to earn extra money from home. With this, we are making sure to capture these stories and focus more so on building a stronger community of users. Some of the KPIs we are looking at are centered around the engagement of our community and participation with key leaders.
We are fortunate that the Fluz business is highly relevant to what is happening in today’s landscape.”
What adjustments are you making to your business strategies in order to hit these new KPIs?
People look to Fluz to earn part-time to full-time income through the social connections they already have. We are fortunate that the Fluz business is highly relevant to what is happening in today’s landscape. With that, we need to make sure we package the product to convey that to the new users coming in and share that same story with the existing community. We are now pivoting to focus on a different set of merchants as the market demand shifts.
