In ESPRIT project PROFES, measurement according to the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) approach is conducted in industrial software projects at Draeger Medical Technology, Ericsson Finland, and Schlumberger Retail Petroleum Systems. A comparative case study investigates three different ways of applying GQM in product-focused process improvement: (1) Long-term GQM measurement programmes at the application sites to better understand and improve software products and processes. (2) GQM-based construction and validation of product/process dependency models, which describe the process impact on software quality. (3) Cost/Benefit investigation of the PROFES improvement methodology using GQM for (meta-)analysis of improvement programmes. This paper outlines how GQM is applied for these three purposes.