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DAU/MAU Can Tell You How Sticky Your Product Is, But Not Why
One of the first product metrics I remember getting excited about was DAU/MAU. The number looked simple. Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users. One percentage that seemed to answer a big question: “How often are people coming back to our product?” It is useful. But after working with product metrics for a while,…
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Are You Solving Customer Problems or Just Building Features?
One question has stayed with me throughout my journey as a Product Manager. “If we didn’t build this feature, what customer problem would remain unsolved?” It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time discussing features. Roadmaps were filled with requests from customers, ideas from…
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The Hidden Cost of Becoming a Feature Factory
Early in my product management career, I thought productivity looked something like this: More roadmap items completed. More features released. More sprint goals achieved. If we were shipping consistently, we were succeeding. At least that’s what I believed. Then something unexpected happened. Despite delivering features almost every sprint, customer satisfaction barely improved. Support tickets kept…
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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…