How to Identify Business Value as an Architect

This post is part of our Lessons Learned from Salesforce Well-Architected series.

Knowing how to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that meaningfully track progress against business goals is a valuable skill that every architect should have. But finding the right KPIs can be more complex than you may think. If you’re not careful, you can end up tracking a list of superficial metrics that look good on paper but don’t actually indicate whether or not the work you’re doing is providing any real business value.

I can personally attest to this. When I was writing my first book, I was convinced that a big social media following was key to being a successful author. For several months, I spent hours posting, liking, commenting, and cultivating as many followers as I could every day. Eventually I had tens of thousands of followers across multiple platforms and my posts would receive thousands of likes within minutes. Clearly my followers all loved me and couldn’t wait to buy my book, right?

Not so much.

Not long after my publish date, I looked at my metrics. I was surprised to see that less than 1% of my total sales had been generated by social media. My overall numbers were fine but that stat annoyed me because of the amount of time I had put into building such a big following. When I divided the amount of revenue my channels had actually generated by the number of hours I had spent on social media, it turned out that all that effort was like working at a job that pays only 28 cents per hour. It turns out that there’s a big difference between tapping a little heart on your phone to let someone know you like their Instagram post and actually purchasing a product from them.

If there’s one silver lining to this experience, it’s that in the process, I discovered another metric that actually is useful to track: percentage of sales generated through social media. Based on this value, I could determine how much time I should be spending trying to promote my books on social media vs through other channels. It helped me to use my time more effectively by focusing more of my energy on the channels that were bringing in the most revenue.

Our Architect Relations team has recently been thinking about our content goals and trying to decide what KPIs we should be tracking to make sure that our content is resonating with our audience. I shared my story with everyone to make sure we wouldn’t end up making decisions based on vanity metrics, such as the number of likes our social media posts were getting.

So we decided to take a different approach. We began by listing all of the channels we use to publish content. We then assigned one team member to each channel. It was that person’s job to recommend a set of annual goals for their channel and identify the KPIs that we should be using to track our progress toward those goals. The key was to focus on metrics that would actually show us whether or not our audience was engaging with our content and using our resources to do their jobs, which is the reason our team exists.

Rather than simply tracking likes and impressions, we came up with a much stronger list of metrics, including the amount of website traffic coming from our social media channels, the percentage of people who download our templates after reading their descriptions, and the amount of time people spend reading our decision guides. We also identified the source of each metric to verify that we would be able to accurately track it. And even though our overall goals are annual, we wanted to track our performance more frequently to help identify issues and course-correct as early as possible. So, we identified relevant time frames to measure each KPI as well.

As a final step, we associated our content channel goals with our overall team goals so we could hold ourselves accountable for them. The most important thing about this exercise is that we didn’t just do it for ourselves. While we all enjoy seeing healthy numbers when we look at our metrics, we also know that the true beneficiaries are our audience members. We can gauge our performance against our KPIs to make decisions about what we should keep as-is, what can be improved, and what we should eliminate based on the way people are engaging with us. Ultimately, this will lead to continuous content improvements that will provide even more value for our architect community.