Recently I read the following tweet by @mkapor (Mitch Kapor – bio: founder, angel, director: Lotus, EFF, Mozilla, Second Life, Foxmarks. Into IT, innovation, politics, and a level playing field):

GM failure no more surprising to me than a cardiac event in someone with decades of smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure.

source: http://twitter.com/mkapor/status/2020234200

That quote make us think: what are the bad habits that may be harming our business or our product? Do we know when something goes bad?

Marty Cagan recently published an article on Product Scorecard:

A “Product Scorecard” is the term I personally like for establishing the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that each product manager, and the overall product organization, uses to make decisions and drive products.

Now, the specific KPI is not the real point here as much as the fact of establishing specific KPI’s, and the fact that they’re prioritized. You can and should debate the specifics of each KPI and its priority, to ensure that you are encouraging the right behavior as you interpret the business strategy.

It is a simplified Balanced Scored that helps product managers and business leader manage their product or business.

KPI’s, the Product Scorecard and the Balanced Scorecard can be used as tools to check our product or business health. And if we are able to save historical data we can check how these indexes change over time. If there’s a subtle change, we should check for an specific event that may have caused the change.

So, how is your business health?