Identify the Metric That Matters Most

This post is all about the only metrics that matters for early stage startups.

If you do not measure, you can not manage, And If you do not manage, you can not improve.

All companies wants to know more about their customers. They want to understand how their customers are engaging with their product.

They need this data to validate their assumption regarding Product-market-fit and identify opportunities for growth experiments.

Before product launch, you can get customer insights by talking to customers directly. But as soon as you hit customer base, you should start measure your customers activities by leveraging quantitative data, learning methods & tools.

But the next question arises, What to measure, and how much to measure? And most of the PMs end up measuring lot of things. Frequent mistake is having too many metrics to monitor.

Thumb rule is :- Pick one North star metric & Monitor 3–4 other metrics.

Three important & only metrics you should measure are :-

1. Is my product easy to understand?

Are your customers getting what you want to convey them? The way you present information affects how customers interpret and decide. The same facts presented in two different ways can lead to different outcomes or decision from them.

Ways to Identify this :-

• Do customers even bother to signup? :- Identify Signup page visits, Number of fields entered/not-entered, how many customers clicked on register button.
• Are they going to one page or multiple pages? This shows people are actually interested in your product if they are visiting multiple pages.
• For B2B companies :- Do they visit pricing page?

2. Is it easy to get started with my product?

Ways to identify this :-

• Measure entire funnel of Onboarding experience. Landing page visits → Signup page visits → Home page visits → Core action page visit → Core action completion. Measure drop-offs at each stage.
• If you have multiple onboarding pages (A/B), Measure funnel separately. Constantly iterate on your initial user experience.
• Measure time taken to do core action Vs Average session of one user. :- If average time spent by user (user session) is less than time taken to complete core action, you need to work on core action completion steps.
• Measure activity in Web vs Mobile cohort. People spent more time on mobile rather on web.

3. Are people coming back to use my product?

In short, User Retention.

Ways to identify this :-

• Is new user coming back after 30 days to do some valuable thing?
• Separate the engaged users from the inactive ones. Measure retention % for web vs mobile vs desktop app.
• Measure MAUs, DAUs & MRU(monthly recurring users).
• Define & monitor MRU for your product. For e.g. MRU is User who has at-least completed core action ‘X’ number of times in ‘Y’ number of days. There should be ‘action’ and ‘time’ both in MRU.

At the End :- Less is more