Announcing the Koan Goal Metrics API

At Koan, we believe the best goals for a team are ones that can be measured objectively and quantitatively. Regardless of whether your team has taken on a goal-setting framework like OKRs (after reading John Doerr’s Measure What Matters) or not, the value of setting goals and tracking your progress through clear metrics can’t be understated.

To help your team track your goals better, we’re launching our Goal Metrics API; it’s an easy way to connect your team’s most important numbers within Koan in real-time. We wanted to share some ways you can get started with our API today.

Getting Started

If you already have some goals set up in Koan, just toggle the API integration switch in the goal edit page.

Once you do that, you’re all set to get started!

Zapier Integrations

The simplest way to get started with the Goal Metrics API is through our Zapier app, which is currently in beta. If you’re already a Zapier user and you’d like to get early access to our app, follow this link for an automatic invite or shoot us an email!

The Zapier app makes it easy to connect a whole slew of services to your Koan goals, with the ability to set your goal’s metric, increment or add a value to it, or subtract a value from it. And if you’re looking for ideas for how to make use of it, we have a few suggestions to help you out:

Customer Growth

If you’re using Stripe to track customer payments and billing information, you can set up a Zap so that every time you get a new customer in Stripe, your customer count in Koan will go up via the Increment Goal Metric action in Zapier.

Lead Conversions

Do you have a goal around converting leads in Salesforce or Intercom? Try setting up a Zap that gets triggered every time a lead converts, and have it connect to an Increment Goal Metric action in Koan.

Incident Tracking

Site outages and downtime are an unfortunate inevitability of any complex software project, but striving to lower incident rates is a worthwhile endeavor. Maybe your team has a budget of five incidents for the quarter. To track this in Koan, you could set up a Zap that triggers every time a new incident is created in PagerDuty, then connect it to a Subtract Goal Metric action in Koan.

User Analytics

Mixpanel is great for tracking all sorts of user events. Maybe you’ve launched a new feature in your product and you want to measure its success by tracking how many times people use the feature. Setting up a Zap is a bit more involved, but still doable.

1. Make the first step of your Zap a Webhook trigger.
2. Provide that Zapier URL to Mixpanel’s webhook setup page. In Mixpanel, be sure to set up the webhook such that it only triggers for exactly the type of user event that you’re tracking.
3. Once the event is sent to Zapier, have the Zap run Koan’s Increment Goal Metric action (or whichever action best suits your needs).

Track Basically Anything!

Sometimes the main place where your data lives is in a regular old spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel. Maybe you have a cell in the table that contains the key value you’re tracking. If so, try setting up a Zap that triggers every time that cell updates, and connect to Koan’s Set Goal Metric action. Now your metric’s value from your spreadsheets will be updated in real-time in Koan right with all your other goals!

For more details on our Zapier integrations, you can always check out our help docs.

Custom Integrations

If Zapier doesn’t fit your needs, it’s simple to build your own custom API integration as well. Getting set up with a custom API integration is as simple as sending a curl HTTP request to your goal’s API URL:

curl \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{ "action": "set", "value" : 250 }' \
  <YOUR_API_URL_HERE>

The above example would set your goal’s metric to 250. Adding or subtracting a value from a goal simply requires changing the action field in the request from set to add or subtract. For the full details on how to work with the API directly, check out our docs. But before you head over there, here are some integration ideas to inspire you:

Code Test Coverage

Maybe your engineering team has a goal of increasing test coverage in your codebase. Every time your CI system (Circle CI for Travis CI, for example) calculates the latest test coverage numbers, you can send the latest figure to Koan through an API call.

NPS

If your team is trying to improve its NPS (Net Promote Score), AskNicely is a great way to do so. Using their API, you can create a connection to Koan with a scheduled AWS Lambda function so that your NPS is always visible inside Koan.

These are just a handful of the types of integrations you can set up with the Goal Metrics API. We’ll be continuing to add more enhancements and capabilities over the coming months. Have you set up a cool metrics integration inside Koan for your team? Let us know!