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The Metric That Keeps Product Teams From Optimizing the Wrong Thing
Early in my career, I thought every product initiative needed one success metric. If we wanted to improve activation, we’d measure activation. If we wanted to increase feature adoption, we’d measure adoption. If we wanted to improve conversions, we’d focus on conversion rate. It sounded logical. Until one experiment taught me otherwise. We redesigned part…
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Beyond Monthly Dashboards: How I Measure Long-Term Product Success
One of the first product dashboards I built made me feel good. Daily active users were growing. Feature adoption was increasing. The latest release had performed well. Every metric suggested we were heading in the right direction. Then, six months later, reality caught up with us. Customers weren’t renewing at the rate we expected. Support…
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The Signals That Numbers Can’t Show: Recognizing Qualitative Product-Market Fit
When Product Managers talk about Product-Market Fit, the conversation usually revolves around metrics. Retention. Revenue. Growth. Net Revenue Retention. Churn. Those metrics are important, and they absolutely deserve attention. But some of the strongest signs that you’re building something customers truly value don’t appear in a dashboard. They show up in conversations. Over the years,…
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Customers Don’t Buy Features. They Buy Solutions to Their Problems.
Early in my career, I was convinced that the best products sold themselves. If a feature was powerful enough, customers would recognize its value. So whenever we launched something new, we talked about the feature. We highlighted what it did, how it worked, and how much effort had gone into building it. The response was……
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Your Feature Might Not Have an Adoption Problem. It Might Have a Positioning Problem.
One of the most frustrating experiences as a Product Manager is launching a feature you’ve spent months building, only to see very few customers use it. I’ve been there. The feature worked exactly as intended. It solved a real problem. Customer feedback during development had been positive. Yet after launch, adoption was far lower than…