not all events are created equal
To those of you building a product, do you agree with this?
Getting a user to sign in is good. Getting that user to invite a teammate is better.
Not all product events are created equal
Every event/action a customer takes in your product carries its own weight.
Counting the number of times something happens isn't a good enough proxy for “engagement.”
Counting user interactions. Tracking time spent on a platform. Monitoring the frequency of visits. You can see how active users are with a product. This misses a key ingredient:
What are those interactions and what do they really mean?
Activity doesn’t equal value
Every Saas company should measure interactions, time on site, frequency, LTV. There’s more to it than answering “how many times” a thing happened, though.
We’ve spoken with a few product teams who found “hot” actions in their products. Tons of users visited this one page in the product and clicked this one button. The assumption, based on the interactions, was that this is an important page and an important button.
So these teams started optimizing for this page and this button. “How can we get every customer to this page?” they asked.
Teams spent time and money getting more users to that page. When customer success teams connected with users and asked about the new experience, the users surprised them.
We only go to that page because it’s how we get to ‘feature x.’
Two lessons from that
The data mislead the teams. There’s no shame in that. We’ve all done it (well, I definitely have looked at data and interpreted how I wanted to).
Those conversations underscored two important ideas for us:
Quantitative data gets you only so far. Adding qualitative data (talking to customers) adds the context and meaning to the quantitative stuff.
Not all events are created equal. This is where product engagement scoring comes, using event counts plus a weighting system to give your data context and meaning.
Don't just count activity. Understand what it means.
There's tons of opportunity in product data. Every team in a Saas company can find something useful. Sales teams can find hot leads. Customer Success can see unhealthy accounts. Marketing can find the best customers to build lookalikes from. Support can see how well the user they're chatting with knows the product.
Understanding the value of product event data comes down to that context. Assigning weighted scores to the important events gives teams the context they need to make confident decisions.
If you don't track anything yet, definitely start. If you do track product events, give your teams the context they need by adding weighting to the event data.
It turns product data into a weapon in the right hands.
Peter
(463 / 500)