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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…
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Building a Product Metrics Framework
One thing I’ve learned about product metrics is that the hardest part isn’t finding metrics to track. It’s deciding which metrics actually matter. Most products already have plenty of data. There are dashboards for acquisition, engagement, retention, revenue, feature usage, customer satisfaction, and dozens of other things. Yet teams can still struggle to answer a…
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Sample vs Population
Early in my product career, I often treated user data as if it represented all users. If 500 customers responded to a survey, I’d look at the results and think, “This is what our customers want.” But 500 responses don’t necessarily represent every customer. That’s the fundamental difference between a sample and a population, and…