As your Customer Validation program scales, it becomes more and more important (and increasingly difficult) to measure your team’s performance effectively. Doing so requires immediate visibility into the core success metrics you’ve laid out for your team so you can measure and analyze team activity without spending days on spreadsheets, logs, and reports. Centercode Platform automatically records project activities and delivers insights for understanding and improving team performance.

How Does it Work?

First, Centercode leverages your user teams to differentiate tester participants from applicants and internal users, like observers and test managers. Centercode tracks user activities for internal and external teams separately, allowing you to manage both tester and project team performance in one place. Centercode’s existing abilities to gather tester-focused information have been expanded to collect and synthesize a broad range of internal user data, including which team members handled each piece of feedback and what their response time was.

Establish KPIs and SLAs for Performance Measurement

The first step to any successful performance management strategy is to identify your KPIs. What is your team’s goal response rate? How quickly should issues move from being found to planned resolution? Do you need different measurements for minor issues vs. critical bugs or feature gaps?

Because the feedback that is coming from your customers or testers can be critical to the success of your product, the team should have an established “service level agreement” (SLA) with your internal clients. This relationship will ensure that your stakeholders understand the importance of the issues, and set the expectation for rapid resolution as needed. Maintaining a standard response time is also important to your testers so that they know their opinions and experiences are valuable. Making sure your testers feel heard will keep them motivated and engaged throughout the project.

Set Up Dashboards and Reports for Increased Visibility

Once you’ve defined your metrics, take a few minutes to set up project dashboards to provide visibility into your internal team’s activities moving forward. Personal dashboards will allow each of your teammates to monitor their own performance as well. Build these dashboards into your project templates and set them to auto-distribute to relevant stakeholders for instant access to your performance data.

Use Centercode’s built-in turnkey Performance Report for a high-level overview of your feedback management, and click into the provided charts to dig deeper into the relevant bugs and issues. With the platform’s enhanced JIRA integration and the new JIRA Link criteria, you can click on the feedback’s JIRA ID to open up the JIRA ticket directly from the report. That goes for any report created in the platform, not just turnkey resources.

Create your own reports to generate customized insights from a wide range of data sets including first responder, time to/from first response, time since status change, and who made the last status change. The data is delivered in comprehensive reports that give deep insights and answer questions like:

• Who are my top first responders?
• Are all of my critical issues being addressed quickly?
• What is my team’s average response time?
• What percentage of issues were responded to within 6, 12, and 24 hours?
• Is there any aging feedback that requires attention? Who is handling that piece of feedback?

With custom numeric segments, Centercode slices and dices your data based on your unique KPIs. For example, if you’re looking to ensure your team’s response rate based on the severity of the bug or issue, you can set the range of each segment based on the escalation levels laid out in your SLAs. You can see the segmented hour ranges in the report below. Custom segments can be applied to all integer-based reports in the Centercode Platform.

Use Automation to Efficiently Manage Performance

You can also use the performance management data captured by Centercode as a trigger for automated events, like sending email to remind feedback owners to address aging feedback, or scoring team member activities. For example, if a critical issue has not been responded to within four hours, you can use a macro to notify the first responder.

You can also set alerts to notify you of any issues that have not been addressed within a week. Combine this with the ability to automatically identify and address testers who have started but not submitted feedback drafts, and you’ll ensure your project and tester teams are engaged and on track. Performance management automation gives you the peace of mind to know that your operation is running the way it should, and that nothing is falling through the cracks.

We’ve covered some useful tactics for implementing Centercode’s performance management features to provide visibility into your team’s project activities, and insights into how to grow team success.