Does Business Growth Indicate Product Health?
Are KPIs and OKRs enough to measure product success? Mor Regev Lalush, Head of Product Guild and Design at Payoneer, introduces 'Meta Metrics' — a measurable framework for assessing long-term product viability beyond traditional dashboards
In the fast-paced world of tech, business growth is often taken as the ultimate indicator of success. Charts pointing upward, record-breaking KPIs, and rapid expansion all signal that a company is thriving. But is that growth sustainable? Does it mean your product is truly healthy?
Companies tend to celebrate achievements when they hit key business milestones. But beneath the surface, critical foundational layers often don’t get the priority they deserve. And the cost of neglecting them? Slow and expensive development, firefighting instead of innovation, a product that struggles to compete, and customers slipping away to better alternatives.
At Payoneer, a global payments platform serving millions of customers in 190+ countries and territories, we know that looking only at business metrics isn’t enough. Even when the numbers looked good, we asked ourselves:
• Are our customers thriving, or are they staying with us out of habit?
• Is our growth product-led?
• Most importantly, can we sustain this growth?
Traditional metrics alone won’t tell you if your product is built to last. Additionally, too often in the tech world, we fall back on vague clichés: our tech stack doesn’t scale, legacy systems slow us down, the UX is bad, the UI is outdated… But these issues mean different things to different people, making them hard to tackle effectively.
At Payoneer, we understood that OKRs (where are we going?), KPIs (how are we performing?) and clichés weren’t enough to measure long-term viability. So, we introduced Meta Metrics - key health indicators that determine whether a product can sustain and scale its success.
Together, these three give us a holistic view of direction, performance, and sustainability.
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Mor Regev Lalush, Senior Director, Head of Product Guild and Design Group, Payoneer
(photo: Peleg Elkalay)
Defining Your Product's Vital Signs
Before jumping into specific Meta Metrics, it's essential to start with a clear vision. Ask yourself: Where do we want the product to be in one year? In three years? Defining this long-term perspective helps identify the key objectives and core values essential to achieving the vision.
Unlike OKRs, which set specific goals to be achieved, Meta Metrics define the vital signs of a product—the underlying factors that indicate whether it's healthy and resilient enough to sustain growth. Just as there are tangible indicators for personal health, like pulse rate, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels, a product also needs defined health indicators that are monitored regularly. Defining a product as “cutting edge,” “top notch,” or “best in class” won’t cut it. It must be measured regularly against objective criteria.
By establishing these fundamental health indicators, we create a structured, measurable approach to product well-being—ensuring we’re not just chasing growth but building a product that can thrive in the long run.
This isn’t just about abstract principles; considering tech debt, evolving regulations and the need to be compliant alongside our goal to build a comprehensive financial stack that meets customers’ evolving needs, we developed these Meta Metrics:
· Tech Health: Managing tech debt and ensuring scalability.
· Compliance Tech Health: Meeting regulatory requirements without friction.
· Ecosystem Synergy: Moving toward our vision of becoming an SMB financial stack.
· UX Health: Ensuring our product is intuitive, reliable, and engaging.
Each of these is backed by a formula—an underlying structure of sub-metrics that keeps us accountable and focused on measurable progress
UX Health: A Deep Dive
We break UX Health into four dimensions:
1. Usability – Task Completion rate and time, and ease of navigation.
2. Trust – Confidence and transparency sentiments.
3. Appearance – A clean and simple interface.
4. Engagement – frequency of use and delivering value beyond expectations.
Each dimension has specific, trackable metrics, measured through Amplitude for behavior, Qualtrics for surveys, and UnitQ for sentiment analysis. These metrics are weighted into a single score, creating an actionable benchmark for product health.
The "Get to Green" Strategy
Once we identified key Meta-Metrics, we created a strategy called "Get to Green." The approach is simple:
1. Define clear health metrics.
2. Identify current standing.
3. Track incremental improvements.
This framework isn’t just about data - it’s about aligning teams around a shared understanding of product health and changing mindsets. We’ve embedded these metrics into our quarterly planning, ensuring product leaders across departments set improvement targets based on real data. Each domain leader now reflects on health scores quarterly and sets targeted improvement goals, as well as uses roadmaps to demonstrate the impact of their work.
Today, over 100 product professionals at Payoneer speak a common language when it comes to UX improvements, compliance optimization, and tech modernization. This shared clarity reduces ambiguity, fosters trust, and ensures alignment across teams.
The Path Forward: Your Product's Health Check
The goal isn’t just to "turn everything green" - it’s to build a culture of continuous improvement. To begin your own Meta-Metrics journey, consider these fundamental questions:
1. What are your product’s vital signs?
2. How do you measure them?
3. Is your product healthy enough to keep growing beyond this year?
Remember: Product health isn't a destination—it's an ongoing commitment to excellence. While perfect health might be aspirational, the pursuit of it drives continuous improvement and sustainable success.
In today's competitive landscape, surface-level growth isn't enough. True product leadership requires a deeper understanding of health metrics, a commitment to data-driven decision-making, and the courage to prioritize long-term resilience over short-term gains.
Because building a truly healthy product isn't just about today's performance — it’s about ensuring we lead, innovate, and sustain success for the future.
Key Takeaways:
1. Business growth does not necessarily indicate Product health: Surface-level success doesn’t guarantee long-term sustainability. Meta Metrics provide a deeper layer of insight.
2. Measure What Matters: Defining clear, trackable product health metrics (like UX, tech, product-market fit) ensures teams stay aligned on sustainable improvements.
3. Continuous Improvement is Key: Product health isn’t a one-time milestone—it’s a continuous commitment that requires ongoing attention, deliberate action, and a willingness to evolve.
The information in this document is intended to be of a general nature and does not constitute legal advice. While we have endeavored to ensure that the information is up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability or suitability of the information. In no event will we be liable for any loss or damage including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage, or any loss or damage whatsoever incurred in connection with the information provided.
