What the Heck is Product Analytics in Product Management?
This is the first of several product management articles I will be writing until I successfully break into product management. This is for my fellow future entry-level product managers and other people looking to go into product management.
I just completed a course at Product School, “Product Analytics Micro-Certification (PAC)™,” To commemorate this moment, I decided to write about product analytics in general.
As a product manager, data has to be your best friend. You have to be data-oriented. Data and product management cannot be separated, so there’s a gold mine here. Data is one of the driving wheels of product management.
Now didn’t I say “product analytics”? So why am I suddenly saying “Data”?
First, let’s dive into what product analytics is.
Product analytics
“Product analytics, which is the activity of creating metrics to understand how much value a product delivers to its users.”
— Product School.
Analytics is simply put, the study of data. Product analytics is data analytics but data analytics might not be product analytics.
Why data analytics in product management?
As a product manager, you’re concerned with everything that affects the success of a product. So how do you keep track of what, and what affects the relevance of your product?
Data!
Data helps you make informed and valuable decisions. Product analytics is making use of this data to better understand user needs. Understanding the customer and their needs are essential to building valuable products. It helps answer questions like:
Is this product the right market fit?
Is this product desirable?
It helps determine if your SMART goals are relevant and a success. As a product manager, Data is your sight. It guides the development process, even after release. Trying to make sense of this data and making use of it is what data analytics is.
Product analytics and innovation
According to CEO and Founder of Improvides, Nick Skillicorn, innovation is turning an idea into a solution that adds value from a customer’s perspective. That’s what we do as product managers.
With product analytics, we can keep track of metrics like; product feature adoption rate, time to value (TTV), daily active users (DAU), customer satisfaction rate/ score, customer retention rate, etc. These types of data provide us the backing to know if our product is moving towards innovation.
To build an innovative product, one must consider three key factors, desirability, feasibility, and viability. The idea originated from IDEO.
Innovation is a combination of these three factors. With product analytics, it’s possible to determine if your product is “desirable from a human point of view, technologically feasible and economically viable.”
— Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO.
It is safe to say that product analytics drives innovation. There are various tools product managers can use for product analytics. This course “Product Analytics Micro-Certification (PAC)™” is a free certification course on productschool.com sponsored by Mixpanel.
Mixpanel is a leading products analytics software company and answers most product-related questions. Although I haven’t used a lot of product analytics software, Mixpanel was a great start!.
Let’s talk more about product analytics. You can find me on LinkedIn.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
