Are you measuring the ultimate impact on your customer?

Consider a human impact metric alongside business/product outcomes

We are all swimming in metrics: revenue, CVR, LTV, ARPU, MAUs, etc. We use indicators such as purchases and ongoing usage as indicators that our customers are perceiving and experiencing value from what we offer.

This is great, but I wonder: what if we took it a step further and measured the direct human impact on our end users?

Like a true experiment, what if we could measure the actual human impact on our customers that our product intends to create, using well-validated constructs?

For example, Asana is intended to drive team productivity and flow. Well, science has well-validated measures for flow that we could use to measure if that intended impact is actually occurring. This applies to a wide range of other intentions that products/services aim to create: creativity, mastery, motivation, autonomy, health/vitality, financial wellbeing, better relationships, etc.

It's a simple idea: add a metric tracking if your product is having the actual impact on your customers that you intend.

Courtney Bigony and Scott Barry Kaufman, a leading humanistic psychologist, created the Positive Product Design (PPD) framework to do just this: directly measure the positive psychological contribution of an intervention like a product.

Similar concepts come from the world of social/environmental impact, such as the concept of a double bottom line. PPD fascinates me as it extends the same idea to the intra/interpersonal domain of commercial products.

I'm not yet sure if these would apply to all products, but it seems worth exploring. For more, check out this conversation I had with Courtney Bigony, creator of the PPD framework.