5 ways that the best product teams use session replay

How to develop product intuition with powerful workflows

There are visible differences between high-performing and low-performing product teams, but few are as discernible as “product intuition.” This is when a product team consistently and almost effortlessly ships value and “rarely misses,” without ever appearing to do exhaustive research or diligence.

Skeptics will wrongly call this alchemy and say it’s the antithesis of being data-driven, mistakenly believing that product intuition relies on vibes and anecdotes. The reality is that intuition is more like actionable empathy that the best product teams carefully develop via ongoing and persistent interactions with the customer rather than isolated ad hoc research. Think about how easy it is to find the right gift for your best friend but how much research is required to find a gift for a remote colleague. You don’t need a SQL query to be a great friend or a great product manager.

Of the many tools in the high-performing product team’s arsenal, session replay is perhaps the most powerful. For those unfamiliar, session replay is the ability to watch recorded “videos” of a user’s interactions and experiences with your website or application, including mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, and any issues encountered. The best session replay tools include the ability to watch at accelerated speed, along with heat maps and quantitative funnel analyses.

Session replay is the digital equivalent of the renowned Toyota Production System management principle of Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) which emphasizes the importance of being in the trenches and observing the action where it’s happening. Instead of a focus group, survey, or other artificial environment, session replay gives product teams the qualitative and quantitative ability to observe and learn from users while in their “natural habitat.”

My team has been leveraging session replay technology for nearly a decade to develop intuition in order to build and optimize consumer and enterprise software products used by millions of people daily. I’ve written extensively about the research techniques we used to rapidly scale Coderbyte. We recently tried and reviewed the best session replay tools and selected Session Rewind.

No matter what session playback tool is used, here are the 5 ways that the best product teams use session replay to gain product intuition over time.

#1 — Obsess over adoption

Within a session replay tool, you can define events and build targeted search filters to find and watch relevant sessions capturing key experiences. Most tools enable you to easily define click events without writing any code, which is great for non-technical product managers and UX designers.

Immediately after launching a new feature, we define the relevant click events or pages, and watch sessions with users trying it out. It’s like mission control for feature adoption, and we’ll always quickly identify quick improvements we can make to ensure the new feature is more intuitive and valuable.

#2 — Subscribe to key experiences

In addition to obsessively watching users try new features, great product teams subscribe to notifications for important search filters. They’re not always watching as part of a specific research project but rather as part of an overarching objective to better understand the customer.

For example, my team defines events and filters and then subscribes to notifications for the following:

• Sessions with a new admin setting up their account for the first time
• Sessions with an admin that upgrades, downgrades, or cancels their subscription
• Sessions with a user who completes step X of a key flow but never completes step X+1

#3 — Share telling moments

Intuition is only as valuable as influence. If a product team can’t get leadership behind their ideas, it’ll be very difficult to build or sustain momentum. One of the reasons we decided to use Session Rewind is because we can invite unlimited users on any subscription plan and also share individual sessions publicly with non-users using granular controls.

That makes it easy to get buy-in from executives and key stakeholders who never personally login to a tool. No matter how far removed from customers an executive is, it’s nearly impossible for them to argue with a powerful session showing customer frustration or confusion with an experience. It’s a game-changer for meetings and presentations.

#4 — Accelerate support

Session replay is critical for real-time customer experience. Instead of engaging in a lengthy back and forth when a user says they have an issue, you can replay their session to see what they saw, including any bugs or browser issues. If a customer reaches out via support chat, my team will find their ongoing session and help them in real-time. Sessions with bugs are added to our development Slack channel for rapid resolution.

Within a session, developers can toggle to see console logs, page load speeds, and memory usage. More passively, we can also set up dashboards and notifications when errors occur.

#5 — Create a validated feature backlog

Sometimes you see a user figure out a clever workaround to improvise a solution within your product that you never purposefully enabled. You do some digging and learn that many other users have done the same thing. Voila — you’ve got a validated new feature to build. But if it’s low priority or you don’t have engineering bandwidth any time soon, just save the session and link to it in your backlog.

With Session Rewind, manually saved sessions are stored permanently regardless of the data retention policy on our subscription plan.

Are there any clever ways to use session replay that I missed? Share your techniques in the comments.