Product Analytics 101: A Guide to Activating and Engaging your Users

How do you go about product engagement and activation today? There’s probably a dashboard with a set of visualizations that tells you how many users are moving from one stage of your product to another. Based on those visualizations, you decide what modifications to make to the product, which support conversations to trigger, or even which sales calls are needed to close deals.

“Successful” engagement or activation usually looks like your team hitting targets on key business metrics, or enabling stakeholders to do so. However, in our real day-to-day, this success is rarely achieved and is often described as too abstract to even aim for. In this piece, we talk about why that may be if there’s a better way to go about doing this, and how you can actually implement a solution that works to meet your goals better.

Set Your Stance

Any discussion around analytics (or, “tracking activation and engagement of your users”) must first confront the question “Why?”. You must have a sense of what stakeholders are expecting from any analysis. This does not mean the specific metrics and visualizations you will be using - it does not mean scoping out how the dashboard will look or the cadence to review it. It simply means that your analytics must be built around tangible business goals that your company and not just the product and UX teams, can relate to.

This usually looks like:

• Get more users to use the product
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase revenue generated by the product

The exact items on the list will look different for your company based on your maturity and priorities. However, the most important realization for business teams to have is that these are the business goals that you’re driving: not metrics or targets.

Take Aim

Once you’ve identified your goals, the next step is to recognize how you can contribute to them. The key in this exercise is to identify the insights that the product and UX teams can provide the company to help drive business goals across all stakeholders.

For a specific feature, that may look like this:

• How much is a feature being used?
• Is the feature solving the intended customer problem?
• Are the customers showing any specific intent (like increased or decreased usage)?

Questions like these help you align your product team with your internal stakeholders (like the support, sales, and customer success teams). Also, note that these questions will not only come from the product team - your stakeholders will play an important part in this process as they communicate the insights they need from the product.

Providing these insights will allow your stakeholders to drive key business results on their end and often, also generate insights back for product and UX.

Fire!

Take a moment to appreciate what you’ve done. From browsing generic product and UX metrics, you’ve come all the way to defining the exact insights that your business needs from your product teams.

The next step is identifying the exact metrics and visualizations that you can build and that your stakeholders can consume for their downstream business actions.

Depending on your product, this list could look something like this:

• DAUs/WAUs/MAUs
• Number of bugs reported/resolved for a particular feature
• Users with signals of churn: low usage, etc.
• Users with signals of upsell: increased usage, etc.

Building dashboards around these metrics and communicating them to your internal stakeholders could greatly enhance how the product team impacts business decisions. It will also allow better information to flow back to the product team, as structured information allows other functions to comment better on how the product and user experience can be improved based on customer feedback.

The Problem

You’re probably thinking at this point - “This is nothing new, the problem is simply execution! It’s not possible to do all of this at once.”

Well, it is. The problem is not that there’s too much to do, the problem is you don’t have the right tools to do it. You can’t cut a tree with a hammer. Today, the default go-to for product analytics visualizations are solutions like Mixpanel or Amplitude. While they offer many powerful ways to segment and analyze product data, they have one fundamental flaw: they create a silo of product data that separates it from consumption by other stakeholders of this data. This in turn severely limits the impact that product data and analysis can have on the overall business.

This is exactly what Houseware intends to change. Instead of moving your data away from the business in order to analyze it, we bring the analysis to your data. We provide robust workflows using which you can trigger downstream business actions across your company - not just within your product team. What’s more, you don’t have to trade off on any product analysis capabilities: the data in your warehouse can solve everything that you need and more.

We do this by integrating with your data warehouse - the central system of record for your entire organization - it contains all of your organization’s data, including the data for product usage. Instead of moving your data out of the warehouse for performing your analysis, you can keep it where it is and do the same analysis. It has several major benefits for your team and organization:

• Skip implementation of cumbersome ETL pipelines that you end up paying for and maintaining
• Gain transparency in storage and compute costs
• Reduce your onboarding cycle from months to days.
  • Since you don’t have to go through tedious data onboarding: simply give Houseware access to the data in your warehouse and start using it!
• Use your product data to activate different business use cases like targeting users for marketing campaigns, or accounts for sales pitches