Working with metrics as a Product Manager - Part 0
Not all metrics are created equally. Tracking the correct metrics is half the battle; next, you must analyze them for actionable insights. Otherwise, there's little sense in collecting all that data.
Are you tracking the right metrics and getting actionable insights?
There are no product roles that can entirely ignore product metrics. Without metrics, how will you know when you've achieved success? How will you know where to go?
I'm metrics-obsessed, probably because I love to know where I'm going. As a kid on family road trips, I followed along on the map (before GPS), measuring our progress and calling out the next turn, determined to know how much longer until we arrived. I was the GPS.
In my day job, I spend a large percentage of my time analyzing data, but not just our product metrics; I analyze customer reviews, leveraging OpenAI’s LLM for sentiment analysis, and I even tracked how I allocated my time for an entire year. (If you're interested, see a post from last year where I talked about this in more detail).
Not all metrics are created equally. Tracking the correct metrics is half the battle; next, you must analyze them for actionable insights. There's little sense in collecting all that data if you won't do anything with it.
A note on collecting data: most platforms won't let you go back and add data points you forgot to include. The majority are event-based systems that record events as they happen, so it's critical to think ahead about what you want to measure.
You can track metrics across many categories, such as acquisition, conversion, retention, engagement, monetization, reviews, and performance, to name a few. In my personal life, I even created a 125-point checklist complete with a weighted scoring matrix to help me decide what used car to buy. Like I said, I'm obsessed.
Over the next few weeks, I'll take a deeper dive into measuring and finding insights from the metrics in these categories, but for now, I have a few thoughts I'll leave you with.
Do you understand the correlation between all of your metrics and revenue?
Can you drill down into data, filtering by country, device and other attributes?
Are you measuring conversion at every step of the user journey?
How do you define things like active users, re-activated users, etc.?
Are you using the same timelines and time zone for all your reports?
Do others in the company have easy access to data and reports?
Are you running experiments and reserving some traffic as a control group?
Do you set thresholds for alerts to ensure you don't miss anything?
Are you able to make predictions with your data?
Are you checking data regularly?
Can you trust your data?
If there's a specific area you want me to cover in this series in more depth, leave a comment below. I'd love to hear from you.