If we learned anything from the Product-Led Festival, it’s that product analytics is crucial to growth.
Mixpanel’s own Ross Walker and Product Collective Co-founder Mike Belsito, had a great discussion focusing on advancing your product analytics strategy, and this has been extrapolated out further in their latest guide.
Read nowThere is a whole host of valuable, actionable insights on offer, but we’ve done our best to narrow it down to the top 5 takeaways.
Enjoy!
Product analytics maturity is made up of four pillars
The guide neatly divides up product analytics maturity into four key pillars: data collection, depth of analysis, collaboration, and product metrics.
Whilst we’ll let you dive into the report to take a full deep dive into each one, a key takeaway is exactly what product analytics is comprised of!
- Data Collection: How to gather, track and prepare product data to later be analyzed
- Depth of Analysis: Inspecting, segmenting, and transforming the data
- Collaboration: The accessibility and usability of the tool for everyone involved
- Product Metrics: Indicators of success measured from the data
A key determinant of your capacity to carry out these four pillars is your product analytics maturity, as this will dictate how you can rely on the data to inform your product decisions, which leads us to another highlight from the report.
Understand your product analytics maturity
Product maturity comes in stages and whilst being sequential, it is not necessarily consecutive.
A team can leap in its product analytics maturity from ‘novice’ to ‘advanced’ if they have collected the right data, focussed on the right questions, and invested in the right tool.
Mixpanel offers a great quiz to help you understand where in your maturity lifecycle you’re currently at. There are five tiers in their product maturity model, from non-existent to expert. It’s vital to determine where you’re at in order to:
- Build the right things
- Empower teams to move faster
- Move the metrics that matter to your business
Know where you’re headed
Going from A to B involves a few key things. Having an A, a B, and a method of getting from one to the other.
If product analytics is going to be your transformative method of advancing growth, you have to truly understand where, and what, your B is.
Is it actually product analytics that you want, or is it marketing analytics that you are thinking of? Product analytics will help you identify trends in user behavior, uncover product flows that cause churn, and get real-time insight into product usage. It’s about looking at the cause, rather than the effect.
You have to have a firm grasp of the endgame you are looking to achieve, in order for product analytics to make up the recipe for success you want it to be.
This involves knowing what questions you are going to ask of your data and having a robust framework for the metrics you want to measure. Direct your attention towards specific success metrics that you believe determine the value of your product.
Gain alignment around product analytics
Being the only person in the room who wants to go see a new movie can be a tough sell and it can be the same story with product analytics.
Before you can start executing on your plan to get from A to B, it's critical to have all internal teams and stakeholders on board. If not, it's unlikely you'll secure the buy-in you need to align everyone behind the right metrics and tool investments.
Start by ensuring they all understand the power of product analytics for delivering value to customers. You'll also want to give them a clear view into where your company currently falls on the product analytics maturity model. When they have a better understanding of the questions you're unable to answer today given your current stage, you'll be much better positioned to discuss the consequences of those gaps and importance in advancing your maturity to ultimately build better products.
With a united front, taking on any obstacles to progressing to your desired point B will be that much easier.
It’s never too late to start
Product analytics can be incredibly valuable to your overall business, by improving every aspect of your product.
However, if you’ve currently got a good product and you’re thinking “I’ve never invested in a product analytics tool, why should I start as a novice?”
The simple answer is you don’t have to.
By using the maturity matrix, you don’t have to crawl before you can run with product analytics. Instead, it can help you determine where you want to end up and the path you should take to get there.
Whether you’ve already got some pieces to the puzzle, or all of them but they’re not quite fitting together nicely, product analytics can revolutionize your entire flow, allowing you to:
- Identify new opportunities and changes
- Drive new value and increase efficiency
- Choose the right analytics tools
- Verify your data
So, be sure to start, or advance, your product analytics journey by reading the full guide, joining the likes of Deliveroo, Ticketmaster, and GoDaddy!
