👷‍♂️📈 Rebuilding Our Reporting Feature: A Problem Well-stated Is a Problem Half-solved

We have had a lot of issues in the past with our reporting feature. We first implemented it because we had to in-order to get our first sale, but we never treated it as a first-class citizen of our product or service. It wasn’t something we treated as a key component of our users’ core activities.

So we built it, without much thought, then secured the sale. Here’s what it looked like:

A thoughtless dashboard

We said to ourselves: “Great! we have got our first customer and managers have their numbers, everybody is happy!” Then we never touched it again.

Shortly afterwards one of our power users began using the feature out of curiosity about this new link that had appeared on her screen. She asked us questions about the figures that are pumped out and how to use it. At this point I thought, she’s just being curious and she’ll get bored of it by next week, it’s just numbers.

I was wrong, she used this daily. I wanted to know why. It wasn’t until then that I figured out that because our customer is driven by results, it meant that we were judged on how much we can impact our customer’s results. How could we ignore the thing that told our customers about how well our product performs?!

As a result of this, we put focus on informing the management of our customers about the impact of our product and the user’s activities. First of all, we needed to understand what they cared about and how to communicate the results.

We started emailing out reports (a lot of reports!) that we would make ourselves. They would take hours to produce and they weren’t all the same format.

Report’n hell!

While the response to these reports were not insightful and ended up being comments such as “thanks” or “fab”, it actually meant that it is what they needed. The managers that would get these would say if there was something missing, then if it is satisfactory or brilliant, the response is along the line of “thanks”. So we were on the right track!

As we later found out, these reports were being used for board meeting and sales teams reports. So we wanted to get know how we could make it useful for the sales teams (something that we thought our “power user” in the beginning was using it for).

Here is a breakdown of feature usage by some select “power users”:

What our users do on the product

We can see a clear division between the job titles and what features are used, but there are some features that they both share.

If we focus on the “Reporting!”, the strength of the green shows to what level they use that feature in relation to the others they use. Given that it is a feature we thought nothing of, the usage seems high!

The interactions such as:

• No sale until we have feature X
• Spontaneous usage from a power user
• Acceptance of the manually-created reports by managers

All gave us the required confidence to say this is a core feature that should not be ignored. This led us to begin investigating about how we can rebuild our reporting feature.