How One Jira Ticket Made My Employer $1MM/Month: 7 Metrics That Actually Matter

&gt; Tip: Your marketing and sales teams should never be allowed to discuss features “in the pipeline”<p>Probably unpopular here, but this is a misguided, engineer-centric view of a business. Sales &amp; marketing should absolutely have <i>some</i> leeway on unreleased features, as they have very close relationships with customers and can get early feedback in the realest way possible: &quot;Will the customer pay for it?&quot; Cutting off this avenue is popular for engineers (myself included) but not necessarily good for the long term health of a business.

At first I thought the ticket was going to be &quot;stop using JIRA&#x2F;Confluence&quot;.<p>There is so much time wasted on this system where I work it&#x27;s amazing. Some people sit all day updating JIRA with all kind of crap instead of actually doing their job.<p>At this point I&#x27;m starting to get the same feeling towards it as towards SAP.

This post has nothing to do with tickets, Jira, Agile or actual in pocket cash. It just says &quot;do a usability test&quot; some time before shipping.

<i>After a while, I ran the same analysis I did before. The shopping cart abandonment rate was reduced by double digits: A difference worth more than $1 million dollars per month.</i><p>This is not a statistically valid way to test the effectiveness of your change.<p>For example, if you sell toys, and you run an analysis on the week before Christmas, then you make your code change, and then check again on the week after Christmas, you are going to have differences in customer behavior that have nothing to do with your change.

&gt; Do I want my team to value the number of tickets closed, or do I want them to value our critical business KPIs?<p>How does this look in practice, in large organizations? Is everyone empowered to freelance on whatever they think will improve said KPIs?<p>At some point, someone needs to have the power to decide what is being built (hopefully with an eye towards KPI-impact), and others need to fall in line and close some tickets.

The problem is in most businesses you can explain this until you&#x27;re blue in the face, to no avail.

Interesting article - most of these metrics should be learned on the job for a lot of product managers.

Sounds like the team lacked a UX designer, probably as well an experienced software product manager. Testing conversion rates is UX 101.

tl;dr: be sure to usability test your products.

2016