Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
5 to work through
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intermediate
A marketplace launches in a new city. Supply and demand are both near zero. What architectural support does this need?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A streaming platform's engineering team optimises for latency and availability while the business measures watch time and creator retention. How should these connect?
2 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
An architecture group wants one metric on the company's executive dashboard, next to revenue and churn. Which one earns its place?
2 min answer -
advanced
How would you justify a six-week reliability investment to a commercial stakeholder?
2 min answer -
advanced
Instacart's 2023 S-1 reported 2022 revenue of $2,551M, split $1,811M transaction and $740M advertising and other. You are the architect for the ad-serving path inside the shopping app. The interviewer asks which business KPI your next six months of work moves, and how you would prove it moved. Talk me through your answer.
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Business KPIs
The measures the business runs on — which architects should understand, influence and instrument.
practiceKPI Attribution Chain
The explicit path from an architecture change through an operational metric and a short-lag product metric to the business measure finance reports - …
conceptLeading and Lagging Indicator
The distinction between a measure that predicts an outcome and one that confirms it after the fact, determining whether a metric can be acted on.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.