Too many strategic plans lead with Key Performance Indicators. That’s a mistake.
When financial ratios, activity metrics, and dashboard data dominate the opening conversation, it creates the illusion that measurement is strategy. But measurement is the byproduct of strategy — not the strategy itself.
Key Performance Indicators aren’t where you start. They’re where you arrive.
By the time a KPI shows up on a dashboard, your leadership team should have already done the deep work — identifying key possibilities, declaring priorities, investing in infrastructure, launching initiatives, and watching predictive insights roll in.
If you’ve worked through those layers with discipline and clarity, then your KPIs become something different. Not just indicators of what’s happened… but evidence that you’re winning at what matters most.
The Problem with Default KPIs
Default KPIs are easy:
- Loan growth.
- Deposit growth.
- ROA.
- NIM.
- Member satisfaction.
They’re familiar. They’re consistent. They’re mostly backward-looking. And they are, in many cases, too vague to be meaningful and too generalized to be decisive.
Worse, they’re often tied to a one-year budget — not a multi-year strategy. That creates a dangerous tension between short-term metrics and long-term transformation. You don’t build the future by obsessing over what happened last quarter.
Strategic KPIs Drive Strategic Decisions
When you’ve done the real strategic planning work — the kind this KPI series lays out — you start measuring differently. You move from tracking numbers to tracking progress against purpose.
Real Key Performance Indicators should answer:
- Are we expanding our relevance with the right members?
- Are we converting our strategic bets into measurable outcomes?
- Are our people and systems executing with precision and accountability?
- Are our decisions compounding into long-term growth and sustainability?
KPIs of Relevance turn into KPIs of Performance. That’s the endgame.
What 10XCUs Measures Differently
At 10XCUs, standard dashboards don’t cut it. They’ve built performance scorecards that reflect strategic ambition, not just operational status.
A few examples of what gets measured differently:
- Strategic Member Growth – not just raw membership numbers, but net growth in high-value segments identified through analytics and experience mapping.
- Project Impact Velocity – measuring how quickly strategic initiatives move from concept to deployment to ROI.
- Infrastructure ROI – not just IT spend, but percentage of spend producing measurable impact on efficiency, experience, or revenue enablement.
- Employee Capacity Utilization – tracking if top talent is spending time on core strategic execution versus operational overhead.
- Predictive Accuracy – comparing forward-looking forecasts to actual outcomes to improve forecasting muscle and insight quality.
This isn’t academic. These metrics sharpen executive focus, board oversight, and institutional clarity. Strategy becomes a closed loop — imagine, prioritize, invest, execute, predict, measure — and then repeat, faster and smarter.
The Performance Flywheel
Strategic KPIs are not static measurements. They are the fuel of the performance flywheel:
- Clarity on what matters most.
- Alignment across people, process, and capital.
- Execution of bold, well-sequenced initiatives.
- Forecasting that anticipates change before it arrives.
- Measurement that reinforces performance, signals risks, and scales success.
If any of these steps falter, KPIs lose meaning. But when they connect, the entire organization gains momentum — and builds an operating rhythm that compounds value over time.
Where to Go From Here
If your credit union is still starting its planning process by asking, “What do we want our ROA to be next year?” you’re playing small.
Start asking bigger questions:
- What new value will we create?
- What member needs are we positioned to solve uniquely?
- What capabilities must we build to win in a market that doesn’t stand still?
Then — and only then — ask what success should look like, and how to measure it.
That’s when Key Performance Indicators become more than ratios. They become reflections of relevance, growth, and transformation.
Bottom line:
KPI-driven credit unions are common.
KPI-informed credit unions are different.
KPIs-of-Relevance credit unions are dominant.
The future belongs to credit unions that measure what they mean to their members, not just what they do.
Jeff Rendel works with America’s top-performing credit unions to design bold, strategy-first operating models that lead to measurable results. As the architect of the 10XCU system, Jeff equips CEOs and boards with practical frameworks that align relevance, growth, and performance in every planning cycle. Learn more at www.jeffrendel.com or connect directly at jeff@jeffrendel.com or 951.310.7275 (mobile).