Product Analytics — How to measure your software development success

“What gets measured gets done. It is especially true these days with the availability of data at low cost and the wave of new technologies which enable us to analyze data more in depth.” Olivier Blais describes the HEART Framework, a set of success metrics that allows you to answer these questions:

• How can we tell if my product development is efficient?
• Is my new software release successful?
• What telemetry do we need to track?

4 ways to deliver better product analytics

 “Analytics only matters if it drives the right decisions.” Karen Church described the four steps that Intercom took to optimize their predictive analytics process. Those steps include: Foster a culture of open feedback, develop close partnerships, use a common language, and educate your organization. (via @karenchurch)

The hard thing about product analytics

You may have found “implementing a good product analytics process and creating a transparent, data-informed culture across an entire team continues to be extremely hard problems and only getting harder as your growing company becomes a “big data” company and wonders how “AI” will affect them.” Sandhya Hegde explains what’s different with product analytics, how most companies are solving their data problem, and what the futures of building product look like. (via @sandhya)

What every product manager needs to know about product analytics

As a product manager, one way to learn more about your customers is to examine in-product analytics. The data you glean from product analytics tells you “how users actually use the product – not what they want to do, how they think they’re using them, or even how we think they are using them.” In this post, Sam Tardif explains “what product analytics are and why you should use them; how to gain a true understanding of your users so you can pay off “empathy debt”; and how to use analytics to help guide new feature development. (via @Atlassian)

Product Analytics 101: A beginner’s guide

Product analytics “has proven itself as one of the most efficient ways for app companies to increase customer retention.” Product analytics allow companies to “collect quantitative data about user behavior inside their applications and products. That allows them to detect and fix the weakest links in their service and make users more satisfied with their experience.” In this guide, Karolina Lubowicka explains product analytics, identifies the key questions product analytics answers and explains the difference between product analytics and marketing analytics. (via @PiwikPro)

Minimum viable analytics

In an effort to be ‘data driven’, teams fall into one or more of the following traps: Tracking the wrong things, Tracking everything possible, Failing to effectively structure and process the data that is collected, Analysis paralysis, or Failing to keep analytics up to date with new product updates. To avoid these traps, you should take a lean approach to tracking analytics and working with the data you collect. Andy Carvell presents some guidelines to help teams figure out that minimum viable level of analytics needed to iterate on product and marketing objectives at different stages of growth. (via @andy_carvell)

What every product manager needs to know about product analytics

“As product managers, we take every opportunity we get to learn more about our customers because understanding their needs is critical to building useful products. This means conducting customer interviews, running surveys, and examining in-product analytics. The data we glean from product analytics tells us how users actually use the product – not what they want to do, how they think they’re using them, or even how we think they are using them.” Sam Tardif explains “what product analytics are and why you should use them; how to gain a true understanding of your users so you can pay off “empathy debt”; and how to use analytics to help guide new feature development.” (via @samtardif)

How to successfully incorporate analytics into your growth marketing process

You’ve probably discovered by now that achieving and maintaining consistent growth means retaining your existing customers as well as attracting new ones. “There are no easy or one-size-fits-all tricks when it comes to acquiring and retaining customers.” Rather, you need to follow a fairly involved growth marketing process that makes use of web analytics to “detect underperforming areas of your website or mobile app, missed opportunities, and low hanging fruit.” Karolina Lubowicka describes “the role analytics plays in Growth Marketing and how to configure it to make better, more informed decisions.” (via @piwikpro)

Important advice about product growth analytics

“Whether you are launching a new mobile app, or wondering how to improve your existing website, you know you need a proper analytics product.” You also know that you need to track some key metrics such as the number of users who sign up, complete a purchase, complete a passive action, or create a piece of content. That information is helpful, but you need to track more to know why your users behave the way they do.  Nicolas Grasset’s advice for using product analytics to increase your growth is to “track all users coming in and out of your part of the funnel and track where they are coming from and where are they leaving to.” (via @fellowshipofone)

Growth Decisions Based on Tracked Positive & Negative Experiences

If existing user’s experiences are positive, you want them to tell others. If their experiences are negative you want them to tell you. Dicky Singh explains how you can use “the difference between positive and negative experiences to make multiple decisions, including whether to ask for an app-store rating, ask for a review in an e-commerce product, recommend user update to a newer version of the app, redirect to support, or recommend installing other apps.” (via @dickeysingh)