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How to Investigate an Unexpected Metric Change
One of the most uncomfortable moments for a Product Manager is opening a dashboard and seeing a metric suddenly move. Conversion is down 12%. Retention is up 8%. Usage has doubled overnight. The first instinct is usually to explain it. “What happened?” But I’ve learned that the first question should be slightly different: “Can I…
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Time to Value Across Multiple Stakeholders
One thing I’ve learned from working on B2B products is that the person who buys a product isn’t always the person who uses it. And the person who uses it isn’t necessarily the person who decides whether the product is successful. This creates an interesting Product Management challenge. When multiple stakeholders are involved, whose Time…
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Using Percentiles to Measure Time to Value
One thing I’ve learned about product metrics is that averages can sometimes hide the most important part of the story. Imagine you measure how long it takes users to reach their first meaningful value and get an average of 12 minutes. That sounds useful. But what if half your users reach value in 3 minutes…
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Designing for Immediate Feedback
One of the simplest ways to make a product feel easier to use is to tell users what just happened. I’ve noticed that many frustrating product experiences aren’t necessarily caused by complicated workflows. They’re caused by uncertainty. Did my action work? Was my information saved? Is something still processing? Did the system understand what I…
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Defaults and Faster Time to Value
One of the simplest ways to make a product easier to use is also one of the easiest to overlook. Choose sensible defaults. Every time a user has to make a decision, enter information, configure a setting, or choose between multiple options, there’s a small amount of friction. One decision isn’t usually a problem. But…