Your Product Teams Are Optimizing for Metrics That Don't Matter
Your checkout team just shipped a feature that increased conversion by 12%. Your onboarding squad reduced time-to-value by 2 days. Your growth team boosted activation by 8%.
Great quarter, right?
Except revenue is flat. Churn is up. And your CEO is asking what the product org actually delivered.
Here's the problem: each team has metrics. Each team hit their goals. But nobody can draw a straight line from "checkout conversion up 12%" to "company grew by $2M ARR." So leadership sees a product org that's busy... but not necessarily moving the business forward.
Your PMs feel it too. They're optimizing their team's numbers—metrics locked away in Amplitude or Mixpanel that only they understand—while the rest of the company has no idea what product is actually doing. Sales thinks product is just "building features." Finance sees headcount but not impact. Your board asks about the north star metric and gets a quarterly deck with numbers that were accurate six weeks ago.
Meanwhile, your checkout team's conversion win might be cannibalizing your onboarding team's activation efforts. But nobody knows, because the metrics live in different dashboards, owned by different PMs, updated on different cadences.
Turns out, hitting your team's OKRs doesn't mean much if they're not connected to anything that matters.
The Alignment Theater Problem
Most product orgs have a north star metric. Revenue, activated users, weekly active engagement—something leadership cares about.
But that metric lives at 30,000 feet. And your individual product teams are operating at ground level, optimizing for proxy metrics that should ladder up to the company goal... but nobody's actually mapped the connections.
Your search team tracks query success rate. Your notifications team measures open rates. Your payments team watches transaction volume. And somewhere, theoretically, all of this adds up to the north star.
Except it doesn't, because:
- The metrics are scattered across Amplitude, Looker, Google Sheets, OKR tools, and quarterly planning docs that instantly go stale
- The relationships are assumed ("obviously better search helps retention") but never proven with actual data
- The visibility is asymmetric—PMs understand their team's metrics, leadership understands the north star, and nobody can see the full picture
So you do alignment through roadmaps instead of data. You prioritize based on intuition instead of provable impact. And your most data-savvy PM owns metrics on behalf of their team but can't see how their work connects to what the growth team is doing three squads over.
Your product teams are running fast. They're just not sure they're running in the same direction.
What If Every Team Could See Their Impact?
Count's north star metric canvas shows how team-level metrics ladder up to company goals—in one place, with real data, visible to everyone.
Your company's north star at the top. Your product teams below—checkout, onboarding, growth, platform, whatever your Spotify-inspired org structure looks like. Each team's core metrics connected by logical relationships that show exactly how local wins contribute to company outcomes.
And because it's pulling live data from your warehouse (not static snapshots from last quarter), you can see the actual numbers. Checkout's conversion rate. Onboarding's activation. Growth's retention. All updating automatically, all clearly connected to the north star they're supposed to move.
Which is a fancy way of saying: your PMs can finally see that their work matters.
Here's the thing—because it's a canvas, not just another dashboard, your product org can collaborate on it. Your VP of Product drops a sticky on a gap: "Who owns trial-to-paid conversion?" A PM comments on their team's metric: "We improved this by 15% but north star didn't move—are we optimizing the wrong thing?" Your CFO (who can actually access this, unlike your Amplitude workspace) starts a threaded discussion about which product investments are driving revenue.
Cross-functional visibility. Real-time data. Provable connections between team execution and business growth.
Done.
From Busy Work to Business Impact
Here's what changes when your metrics actually align:
PMs feel ownership. They're not just hitting arbitrary team goals—they can see their contribution to company growth. Agency restored.
Leadership gets clarity. Finally understand what the product org is actually delivering. Not features shipped, but business outcomes driven.
The rest of the company gets it. Sales, marketing, finance, operations—they can see what product teams are doing and why it matters. No more black box.
The reality is: your product teams are probably doing great work. They're just doing it in isolation, with scattered metrics, behind data silos that make their impact invisible.
Your north star metric exists. Your team metrics exist. The connections between them... those are usually stuck in someone's head.
Build your metric tree once. Connect team metrics to company goals. Use real data from wherever it lives. And finally give your product org the alignment they need without the theater they don't.