Are You Really Measuring Your Product’s Value Creation?
Here’s a scenario you may know too well:
- You shipped three big roadmap items this quarter.
- You show the exec team that adoption went up 12%.
- Everyone nods. KPIs look green.
- And yet… no one’s quite sure if it actually mattered.
Here’s the kicker: tracking metrics isn’t the same as measuring value.
If you’re not careful, you’ll end up obsessing over adoption graphs without ever stopping to ask:
🧠 “Are we incrementally adding value, or just nudging people through a funnel?”
That’s where one of the simplest models in product strategy comes in: the Value Creation, Value Delivery, Value Capture framework.
🪄 The simplest business model you’ll ever need
This model breaks your product’s role down into three basic questions:
- Value Creation: What outcomes do we enable for customers?
- Value Delivery: Are we reliably and scalably delivering on that promise?
- Value Capture: Are we turning this into a sustainable business?
It’s the ultimate sanity check. If you have deficiencies in any one of the three, your product may be spinning its wheels, even if the dashboards look busy.
📊 Defining product KPIs with the value model
Use the framework to align your product KPIs around what really matters. Here are some examples to get you started:
Example 1: B2C subscription mobile app
Value Creation KPIs
Monthly average number of playlists created per user (music app)
Monthly average number of workouts completed per user (fitness app)
Value Delivery KPIs
App crash rate
Time to content load
Support requests per 1K sessions
Value Capture KPIs
Free-to-paid conversion rate
Average revenue per user (ARPU)
Example 2: B2B SaaS product roadmapping tool
Value Creation KPIs
% of new users who create and share a roadmap within 7 days
% of accounts linking features to strategic goals
Value Delivery KPIs
Downtime, or total time to resolve critical bugs per quarter
System configuration (initial setup) or integration success rate (e.g., Jira)
% of users who completed 3+ core workflows (e.g., strategy → features → releases)
Value Capture KPIs
% of trials converting to paid plans
Expansion revenue from added seats/modules
First-month/first-year churn rate
Pro tip: start with Value Creation. If that’s broken, the rest won’t matter. It helps you step back and ask, “Did we make someone’s life better, or just get them to click a new button?”
🛠 TL;DR
- Use Value Creation, Delivery, and Capture as your product’s strategic skeleton.
- Frame KPIs around each layer to spot gaps and blind spots.
- Start with value creation. Everything else flows from there.
- Use this model to tell a clear story: why you built something, how well it worked, and whether it moved the business forward.
