Product Management Playbook — Part 6/6 — Optimization

The question we ask in this segment is “How do we optimize the product we built and launched based on stakeholder feedback and product usage metrics?”

In my series “Product Management Playbook — 6 Part Series”, I focus on how product managers can build awesome products that users will actually love and use. In the First Part, we understood the users and their problems. In the Second Part, we looked at how do we combine all the research and define where the problem’s exist. In the Third Part, we looked at how can we ideate to find an appropriate solution for the needs and problems we defined. In the Fourth Part, we looked at how do we prioritize and actually build a product. In the Fifth Part, we looked at how do we come up with an awesome plan to launch our awesome product to the market. In this Sixth Part, we will look at how do we optimize the product further based on stakeholder feedback and product usage metrics.

The goal of this phase is to come up with a framework to optimize the product further.

Once you have launched your product into the market, you need to constantly update and optimize your product for it to stay relevant in today’s hyper competitive market. It’s called Perpetual Evolution — commitment to continually update your products. You can gather feedback on your product primarily through two channels — stakeholder feedback, service tickets and product usage metrics.

Stakeholder Feedback

A stakeholder is anyone who is connected or related to your product. It can be the user or senior management or marketing team or support team and so on. Feedback from all these sources must be recorded, classified, summarized and interpreted in an optimum manner. While gathering feedback from stakeholders, the focus must be on the pain points and the outcome of the user rather than a solution or approach.

Service Tickets

As the product matures, more and more businesses are focusing on service tickets to understand where the product is falling short or needs improvement. An overview of the service tickets raised by your users will give you an insight into which feature or functionality should be improved to satisfy user needs. Service tickets are raised when your user faces a roadblock related to a bug or needs clarity or needs some improvement. This is direct feedback from users using the product and who wants the product to be improved. Be sure to validate that the service tickets requests you want to address make sense for the majority of your users and not a small chunk.

Product Usage Metrics

As a product manager, it is essential to have analytics integrated into your product to gain knowledge on the shortfalls of the product. There are many metrics you need to track as a product manager, but the most important type of metrics for product improvement are “User Engagement” metrics. User engagement metrics deal with how your users are using and engaging with your product. Some of the key user engagement metrics include the following:

• Total Time Spent — This is the total time user logs in and uses the product. This metric tells how long users use your product on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This can be further divided into time spent on various features or functionality. This will help with the understanding of the user behavior and product usage patterns.
• Session Intervals — This is the time between two consecutive sessions of your product usage and shows the frequency at which users use the product. This shows how users are accustomed to using your product and how quickly are they returning to use your product again. This can be further divided into sessions on various features or functionality. This will give you direct inputs for improvements.
• Session Lengths — Session length is the measure of the time period between the opening and closing of the product by the user, or in between the first activity and the last activity that the user performs. More engagement would mean longer session duration. This will help you come up with ideas to improve the experience for less-engaged users.
• Screen Flow — Screen flow analysis can be used to track a total number of visits, exits per feature or functionality. A screen flow helps visualize the navigation flow and actions of your product’s users. This analysis would help you get insights on what users did on any particular screen and where they went after that. This will help you redesign the whole user experience and functionality of the product to clear out problem areas.

To stay competitive in today’s hyper competitive world, providing a great product has become paramount, which means companies must continually innovate and optimize their products. Companies should be acting quickly based on user feedback to add or enhance or reduce or remove functionality leveraging latest technologies to stay relevant and ahead of competitors.

“You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.” — Elon Musk, Tesla

This edition of the article concludes the 6 part series of the “Product Management Playbook” will be your guide to creating successful products that your users will actually love and use. Hope the series is insightful and helpful.

What am I missing here? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to share your ideas too!

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