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All great players track the score.

Whether it’s sports, business or life, knowing what you’re optimizing for and having the ability to track your progress towards that goal often makes the difference between just doing alright and being exceptional.

Setting goals allows you to be focused. It leads to higher levels of accountability. And, it helps you — and your team — get clear on what’s really important.

After I published my newsletter on PMM team charters two weeks ago, I received a ton of questions about how I track and share my team metrics. In today’s post, I’ll break down the product marketing scorecard I’ve used at several companies to keep my team on course.

Let’s get into it.

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My PMM Scorecard

A product marketing scorecard needs to fulfill several purposes:

• It needs to hold my team accountable to the metrics we’ve committed to, and provide us with a way to track our progress towards these commitments;

• It needs to build alignment not just within my team, but with our broader cross-functional teams as well;

• And, it needs to be simple enough to guide discussion in regular team rituals.

Here’s the scorecard template I use and love. It’s not fancy. It’s not pretty. But, it’s highly effective.

There’s a few key components:

• First, there is a north star metric - this is the priority metric for the company, and often one we track for multiple years. For example, at Unbounce, this was "revenue growth rate”. We can’t necessarily own this metric ourselves, but we do influence it, and we want to keep it top of mind at all times.

• Next, you’ll notice there are objectives and key results. These should be your PMM team’s annual objectives — they do not change throughout the year. I like to set targets down to the quarterly level to back out to how we’ll meet the annual goal.

• Finally, there is a space for quarterly objectives in the bottom row. These should be the shorter-term objectives your team sets every three months to help reach your annual goals. These can’t be planned a year ahead as you need to be agile quarter to quarter.

What I like about this format is that it’s fairly comprehensive yet still digestible in one view. As each quarter progresses, track the actual results (in the middle column) to ensure you’re pacing towards goal. Depending on how you’re pacing, I recommend you assign each key result a color: green (on target), yellow (pacing behind target) or red (below target).

I use this scorecard at almost every PMM team meeting. Instead of giving status updates about everything on the list, we focus our attention on the most urgent items. Anything green doesn’t need to be talked about. Instead, we focus our discussion on the yellow and red items.

Quarterly Tracking

The scorecard above tracks metrics, not initiatives. But, often, it’s the initiatives that drive the results. For this reason, I like to go one level deeper to connect each quarterly initiative back to the main scorecard.

To do this, I create a second tab in my spreadsheet. In this sheet I track the initiatives we’ve agreed to and assign each one back to a top level objective. I also include the directly responsible individual (DRI), any core team members who may be involved, the initiative deadline and the status of the project. For each initiative, there is space for a target as well as the end results.

This second sheet helps to accomplish two things. First, it ensures all of our work is impacting a larger objective and metric. And, second, it adds an extra level of accountability (not just at the OKR level but at the initiative level too).

What does your scorecard look like? Hit reply and send me your examples — I’d love to see a few different approaches.

CAMPER ESSENTIALS

📚 Reading List: Dig deeper into the OKR methodology in Measure What Matters by John Doerr.

🎧 Playlist: This episode from the Bossy podcast covers scorecards in depth, and helps you understand if you’re crushing it or messing up.

Until next week,