I think you can boil down all of your product decisions into three key metrics: stability, simplicity and speed.
It sounds simple, and it is. But whether you’re writing key results for your OKRs or naming epics for project planning, you will get your entire team on board quickly by suggesting that you focus solely on metrics that quantify stability, simplicity and speed.
Here’s why: when I was a junior developer, I had a VP of Engineering tell me that it was really easy to figure out how what order to build a product’s features in: “make it work, then make it pretty, then make it fast”.
Users will forgive a reasonable amount of slowness, but will just stop using your product if it doesn’t work for them.
That actually makes a lot of sense. If it doesn’t work, nobody will use it. If it works but it’s a pain to use, your user will use it begrudgingly, get frustrated and switch to a competitor as soon as one exists.
If it works and it’s usable, by the time you’re ready to be worried about speed, you’ve proven that you can build an elegant solution to your customer’s problem. (and you better be working on speed at this point!).
If it works and it’s usable and it’s fast, nobody will stop you.