If you’re crafting a product roadmap, your vision and internal alignment must be crystal clear. 

Too often, product leaders start building their roadmap plans only to be bombarded with conflicting feedback in all directions. And all that noise can make it impossible to make any decisions, let alone choose the best one. 

So, how do you get beyond the distractions to build a roadmap you can defend and align around? Let product analytics illuminate the best path forward. Incorporating product data is necessary, but not all product analyses provide the same advantages. This article focuses on five key product analytics measurements to help you build a masterful product roadmap. 

What Is a Product Roadmap?

Product roadmaps are tools that product leaders and managers use to guide product plans and chart progress. It’s a master strategy that maps out long-term goals and outlines a vision of progress for your product. Product roadmaps are important because they unify your teams around a standard set of approaches, actions, and benchmarks. 

Why You Need Data to Back Your Product Roadmap

The best product roadmaps are rooted in product data. That’s because product analytics give you a few essential advantages when you’re building your roadmap:

• Clear direction: Product data shows you what your users’ needs and objectives are. It also can reveal the most significant obstacles they’re currently facing. With that information at your fingertips, it’s easy to make decisions that help improve your users’ experiences. 
• Reliable feedback: Collecting user feedback captures important qualitative data and gives you the tools to improve, then monitor your product roadmap’s impact. Feedback helps identify what’s working, what needs improvement, and what tweaks you can make to supercharge your user experience.
• More buy-in: In-product data gives you something concrete to lean on as you implement your roadmap and measure progress. But it also hands you proof that your plans are helping your company hit its goals. That makes it easier to acquire buy-in from other internal stakeholders. 

5 Product Analytics Measurements To Fuel Your Product Roadmap

When formulating your product roadmap, it is vital that you use the right types of product metrics and reports. If you’re using vanity metrics that just look good to leadership but do not tell the real story or encourage future strategies, it could lead to a stagnant product and stunted growth. Here are five essential product analytics measurements designed to propel a growth-centered product roadmap:

1. Retention Analysis 

Before you can capitalize on ways to grow your product, you first need to understand what available features are compelling your existing customers to stay with you. A fundamental measurement is your retention rate. This metric tells you what proportion or cohort of customers have continued using your product within a specified time period and ultimately renewed their services. By analyzing retention rates regularly, you can correlate product usage dropoff rates to intervene and prevent customer churn. It can also address more significant needs within your product roadmap.

By analyzing retention in conjunction with specific feature usage, personas, or other factors, you can pinpoint which types of users are being retained, what is influencing retention, and identify the most impactful ways your product fuels overall retention rates. A signal of product progress will be seen in company-wide growth, improved net revenue retention rate (NRR), and reduced churn, which are lagging metrics. 

2. User Sentiment

Collecting user feedback through in-app surveys gives you a direct line of sight into your users’ sentiments. It is valuable to capture what your users think needs improvement. You can identify exactly what your users want, need, and are missing by continually measuring user sentiment through Net Promoter Scores (NPS) or Customer Effort Scores (CES).

Take it a step further by creating continuous feedback loops. Continuous feedback means gathering information, using it to make informed decisions, and then pulling in more feedback to refine your decisions and releases. As a whole, this iterative process aligns your product roadmap closer and closer with your users’ needs. The better you improve user experiences, the more your product will grow. 

3. User Path Analysis

User path analysis digs into in-product analytics and shows how your users typically travel through your product. Path analysis can reveal what features your users are flocking to and what friction points stop them from taking desired actions. By seeing these behaviors clearly, it’s easy to craft a product roadmap that helps users blast through any friction points and pull more immediate and long-term value out of your product. 

4. Time-to-Value (TTV)

Proving TTV is critical to product-led growth because the quicker your customers realize value, the more engaged they will become. This process begins with immediate adoption and engagement, continuing with improved product usage, leading to better retention and expansion opportunities. Product analytics make it easier to measure this process and improve TTV by keeping a close eye on usage metrics, including daily and monthly active users, activation rates, and feature adoption rates. 

By using a product analytics platform, such as Gainsight PX, which instantly captures user actions as they take them, it’s possible to spot how your product roadmap decisions affect TTV in real-time. With that, you’ll have the right resources to quickly adjust plans, lower TTV, and drive more product growth. 

5. Feature Adoption Analysis

The sooner your user picks up product features and the more they immerse themselves in the product, the more value they’ll gain—and the stickier your product becomes. That’s why feature and overall product adoption rates are so important as you build your product roadmap. 

These metrics measure how often your users engage with your product or features and how deep they’re diving into the product experience. By measuring adoption rates in conjunction with user data, such as comparing adoption by user persona, you can pinpoint when, why, and how specific types of users are engaging with features. You can also identify which features are driving compelling experiences and build roadmaps that align with what users value and need. 

Build a Product Roadmap That Accelerates Growth

A well-crafted product roadmap won’t just enhance your product. It can also drive company-wide growth and help your Product teams catapult past your goals. The best product roadmaps create unbeatable product experiences that your users love. Read our “Building Winning Product Experiences” whitepaper to learn how to use your product to boost your user’s experience and speed up growth.