Measure Your Software Product
While you running a software product, you do care about your product features and your user. You care about how many people are using this service to do the valuable thing, that really helps them. How the product can benefit people? How many new users you get this month? Mom? QoQ? YoY? Do they use it smoothly? So many questions in your mind, around your team every moment. You definitely should measure your product, and your service to find the direction to move up.
Basic Software Metrics：
Basically, we are in the software world, it’s a high possibility your product is composed of tons of API. No matter inside your product or you connect it from diverse APIs of 3rd-party. It’s quite basic to guarantee the APIs quality, and usually, we take care of this：
- Latency (one-way or round-trip)
- Processing time
- Response time
- Pass Rate
- Effective Pass Rate
Basic Product Metrics：
Besides some API basic metrics, we should also care about the entire product level to have an overall perspective of our product. Below are some common metrics about the product：
- Uptime
- Traffic/Visits
- Member
- Retention
- Conversion Rate (can focus on any aspect)
Common Tool — Conversion Funnel：
Conversion Funnel is quite common for sales and industries, e.g. E-commerce. It’s a common way to show the process of user journey, and how the process and the final result is.
You mind have a question 「What are the right conversion rates of my product?」. for this question I would say：
- Compete with your self
- Compete with your competitor
There is no common standard of conversion rate, since we are in different industry. And we do care about different topic’s conversion rate. For example, for E-Commerce business, according to my own experience, I would say if you are running a E-Commerce business, at least 1~1.5% is better.
Find Your Product Metrics：
We do have tons of product metrics can monitor, usually we have a common set of metrics can start our product measuring journey. Also if you want, you can define tons of product metrics to measure your product.
For different industry, they might care different metrics, for example, if you run a new E-Commerce you care about total visits traffic and also MAU and GMV, right? If you are running an online media company, definitely you care about total traffic too, and also you care about CPM/eCPM and FCP/LCP.
So, how to start your product measuring journey?
- Take common software metrics as must first.
- Take common product metrics from same industry first.
- According to your marketing plan, to get more metrics around your target.
Last One Thing：
Less is more, keep focus on a few metrics first. Don’t try to focus on all metrics at the same time, when your metrics are basically not too wrong.
If your want to push 1–3 metrics for business needs, maybe focus on 1–3 metrics first. Put all energy into it, and put it as your highest priority for a period. This might be more efficient than you talk all metrics with your team all the time.