Our product or service is created for customers. Our customer is a mirror showing what we have done right or wrong. They also decide the success of our work. Therefore, learn something we get on dealing with customers. 

Give great customer experiences. Great customer experiences come from you thinking about what you would need if you are in the place of your customers. Delight them. Make their life easier, happier, and more efficient. To truly take your customers' perspective, you need to understand them inside out, including analyzing their experience, situations, and desires.

Pay attention to the details. Your empathy to customers will let you avoid unnecessary trouble with your customers. Design something that runs like a charm, beautiful that can lighten up their day. 

Make things simple. You would need more effort to make things simple yet valuable. Give out design and ideas to others when we love to use them ourselves. Give them surprises and delights. 

Think about the following interview questions and what you will answer:

• Describe your understanding of customer experience. 
• Tell me an example product or service experience you give to your customers. 

The right set of metrics enables PMO leaders to answer the question: "Does PMO bring values to our organization?" from the stakeholders. We gathered a group of metrics from the PMO community and categorized them into four categories: ​

Business Impact is accessed via business values. It is about project outcome but output. 

• Customer satisfaction score is collected through a customer survey. 
• % of the progress of deliverables contributing to the strategic roadmap
• % of product defection reduction for product optimization projects

PMO Efficiency 

• Time in queue shows how efficient PMO picks up new requests and adds them to the plan.  

Project Delivery 

• % projects successfully delivered 
• % projects delivered within budget, on time, with quality and no scope change
• The total number of value-added tasks in a set period

Cycle Time

• Average actual time spent on tasks 
• Agile metrics: Sprint Burndown, Team Velocity, Lead Time

The following important consideration is to pick 2-3 metrics for the team from the list. The goal is to provide honest feedback. Per Goodhart's law,  when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The restricted list helps the team stay focused and improve instead of figure pointing or gaming to make the result look good. Question to Ask When Defining PMO Performance Metrics 

• What are the effective metrics for PMO?
• Am I thinking from an investor rather than operator perspective? 
• What is the ROI (Return on Investment)? 
• Am I measuring something that drives action? 
• Do I pick a metric because the data is easy to get? 
• Is the measure accurate? 
• Do I have too many metrics? 
• How do I communicate the metric correctly to the right audience? 
• How to avoid gaming? ​

Note: In practice, metrics like the customer satisfaction score, project delivery success rate on time, budget, and values are mainly used. ​

What is hard work? Hard work means to keep working till becoming an expert in the field. A great career starts from the desire to chase excellence. Obstacles like time pressure, exhaustion, family, and health can all be excuses for you to stop doing exceptional work, and doing an excellent job requires getting out of my comfort zone and challenging myself to work harder. 

Don't settle when the result is good enough. Push yourself to get as best as you can. Discover something that can be improved. 

If someone asks, "Tell me about the last time you didn't stop when the result was good enough. What did you do? Why? "do you have your story that doesn't take excuses but actions to move forward? ​