What can you learn from analytics dashboards of your products?
This is analytics that is internal i.e. not shared with customers. It might have PII data and is available to only employees who need it. You can generate analytics dashboards via various tools like Tableau, Google Analytics, Power BI, Pendo and so on. In my experience, as product managers, we should generate dashboards to smartly operate!
The assumption here is that you have created analytics dashboards for products that you have launched. You would have spoken to customers to determine the kind of product that would appeal to them. In other words, you would have metrics that they told you were useful! I highly recommend that you create analytics dashboards that you as product managers or even your product team can benefit from. Let’s see how you can benefit!
Is reality the same as your assumption (you had prior to building the product)?
Many a times, it is possible that you had interviewed a small set of customers (that weren’t representative of the whole picture). As a result, it benefitted only a few customers. Consider evaluating different types of customers for the next time.
What opportunities should you target for different customer types?
When you share analytics dashboards with different product managers/teams, you can drive more innovation because you get an idea of what products/features interest the customers. And therefore you can select the correct customer types for different topics. They say “Sharing is caring”! Nothing could be further from the truth. Different dashboards shared between product managers help drive innovation. If you want to reach out to as many users as possible then smartly use analytics.
How & when do your customers access your product?
Do they access it via web, mobile etc? With the details around this, you can tune your testing. For example, let’s say most of your users use chrome browser for your product then it becomes extremely critical that this browser is very important when you launch your product. Is there a pattern to when users access it? For instance, do they access your product between 8 AM - 4 PM? You ’ll then know when to deploy your code and understand the workflow too.
LEAN is the name of the game!
If you figure that some of your functionalities are not useful to the customers then it is worth deprecating. Over time, you land up supporting it without real reason. Consider running a poll to your customers if you are deprecating some of the features or products.
What are the challenges?
Now we are talking! Data is often not clean or incomplete. We can make better decisions along with the customers when we know how much of the data we are dealing with. Another challenge is when our clients are big corporations. This is because the number of records is huge. When we know this, then we can conduct internal solution workshops before we reach out to customers.
Final Thoughts
As a product managers, we can smartly operate if we know our users well. We can approach the right customers if we know their population level data. We will know the customers well, when we have these analytics dashboards. The important thing is to NOT be caught off guard in front of the customer!!!