The SaaS industry is full of advice on the perfect product metrics to gauge your users’ activation, engagement, and interactions. But how do these concepts translate into real product improvements? If you don’t know exactly what questions you want answered, these product metrics leave you blinded by the very data you hoped would open your eyes.
Not all products are the same
Without additional metrics focusing on user experience, the analytics team will miss out on crucial inputs that the product team can use to inform their decisions
- So much depends on the type of business you’re running. A $99 B2B SaaS app will define engagement very differently than an e-commerce website.
3 touchpoints to determine your metrics
Intent to use
- Activation
- Engagement
- Start with the problem, not with the data. As long as you’re asking the right questions, you’re going to get valuable insights that you can act upon
- Open collaboration with people across the product teams yields many useful signals that can be used to develop impactful PM metrics
Developing your key product metrics
Defining product success metrics is just the beginning: to ensure their success, they need to be advocated for, communicated, and critiqued by a range of teams.
- Using a common, consistent way of working means anyone in the organization can easily understand any product metrics, what they mean and why they are important.
The right product metrics start with the right questions
If the metrics these frameworks produce don’t start with right questions, they don’t influence how a product is built or the direction a business takes
- A single set of metrics to serve an entire company becomes less effective as the company grows
- Teams tend to diverge in terms of the metrics they care about
How data informed the design of our Articles feature
We hypothesized that it was important to understand how long it took a customer to get from actively creating articles (showing intent to use) to getting their customers’ eyes on those articles (activating) efficiently.
- If customers could see the value from the product quickly, they would be more compelled to convert from a trial to a paying user.
Finding the right questions takes collaboration
Defining product metrics that follow from product goals (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success) requires a collaborative partnership between analyst and product development team
- Examples: Average time to convert a user from a trial to a paying user, Percentage of users who used a certain product feature, Average number of times a user performed a key action
