Achieving Success at FlowFuse

There's multiple ways to align a company around business goals, and at FlowFuse we've identified two ways to help us shape this. The core metric are captured in our KPIs. A KPI is a tool to identify problems and areas for improvement.

The second tool employed at FlowFuse to improve on the identfied problems are OKRs.

KPI

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is used as a heuristic metric for company-wide success. At FlowFuse we're engaged in many initiatives to grow our offering and assess product-market fit.

We review KPIs every Tuesday as part of our recurring strategy meeting. At this point in time, we review the following KPIs:

  • Engineering Throughput
  • NR Active Instances
  • MQLs
  • CARR Projected (This Q)
  • CARR Closed (This Q)
  • CARR Goal (This Q)
  • MRR

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Now FlowFuse has a stable and maturing product, we're trying to verify product market fit. The market verification requires sales, and ARR is a good metric to track this.

Incidental revenue, that's not recurring, doesn't factor into this metric as it's hard to build a business with products with unpredictable revenue streams. Furthermore, it's usually harder to scale.

Target growth for this metric is 10% week over week.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for Self-Service

Customers on self-service plans, which presently includes only FlowFuse Cloud (FFC) Starter and Team tier, pay on a monthly basis. For these customers, we track Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).

The MRR of both the Starter and Team tier is equal to the sum of all monthly subscriptions for those two tiers, including metered add-ons for additional services like remote instances and larger instances. As fees are paid on a monthly basis, such revenue is considered to be recurring.

At any time, the current MRR of FFC Starter and Team can be calculated by looking up the corresponding products in Stripe, and adding the sum of each individual product's MRR.

Those products are:

  • FlowFuse Cloud - Starter
  • Starter - Small Instance Add-On
  • Starter - Remote Instance Add-On
  • FlowFuse Team Platform - Cloud
  • Team - Small Instance Add-On
  • Team - Medium Instance Add-On
  • Team - Large Instance Add-On
  • Team - Remote Instance Add-On

For Starter, we calculate MRR by multiplying the total number of subscriptions by the cost of the subscription. This helps keep the focus on growing the number of Starter subscriptions rather than being distracted by noise introduced by short-term discounts, like promotional coupons.

OKRs

OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, are action oriented goals that have a measureable impact on the company. OKRs are intended to be bold and ambitious goals.

Given goals are intended to be bold and aggressive, performance on the OKRs has no influence on compensation or any other performance indicator of a department or individual.

While we don't currently use OKRs as a management tool, when we did OKRs used to be tracked in this internal doc.

Anatomy of an OKR

Per timeboxed period, a couple of OKRs are created. Each of them should describe clearly what the objective is, the key results that will be used to measure the success. Further, the goal and plan to achieve it should align with the values.

The process

Before the OKR period, the CEO sets company wide OKRs. Each of the CEO, CTO, Head of Marketing, Head of UX, and product manager are expected to read the OKRs and work with their teams to develop at least 2 OKRs their team will implement to help achieve the company goal.

At the start of the OKR period, each team will present their OKRs during a company meeting. Bi-weekly meetings will be held where each team will present a quick update on the status of their OKR and current work being done to achieve the key result. At the end of the OKR period, a company wide retrospective will he held to share lessons learned from the OKR.