Identifying Critical Metrics in Your Product

Product Management Interview Preparation series — I

Identifying critical metrics in your product

Are you preparing for product manager interviews? So was I. Trust me it was challenging, to say the least.

Apart from the obvious “Tell me about yourself” and “Why do you want to be a product manager?” questions, many interviewers ask the interviewee to solve a product case.

So, in this article, I will discuss one of the four different product management cases that are frequently asked in interviews — Identifying critical metrics.

Identifying critical metrics

Product metrics are critical because they help with decision-making. Throughout the product development process, more intelligent decisions are made when the appropriate metrics are chosen to track and evaluate.

So, as a product manager, you must identify what metrics to capture in your product. Capturing and storing too many metrics can make you lose sight of what is important and too few metrics can prove to be insufficient.

Let’s look at an example of a case to understand this better…,

Remember to observe the series of steps that go into solving a case rather than just looking at the solution as it is. The process of solving is more important than the solution itself.

Case: Imagine you are building a simple social media website similar to Instagram. What are the crucial user metrics that you intend to capture?

Solution:

Stating the assumptions

• The social media application is being launched on the web only and can be accessed via any browser
• The content on social media can be browsed without creating an account but the user can not interact with content or registered users without a registered account
• Registered users can follow each other, chat with each other, post content in text and multimedia formats, like, comment, and share content
• Revenue is generated from advertisements

The critical metrics that are to be captured can be

1. The website traffic. Within the website traffic, the number of unregistered users browsing content, the number of registered users browsing content
2. The conversion rate of unregistered users to registered users (i.e., the number of users creating a new account) during a period.
3. The average time spent by a user on the website during a period
4. The amount of passive interaction (likes and shares) by a user during a period
5. The amount of active interaction (posts and comments) by a user during a period
6. The ratio of text-only posts or comments to multimedia posts or comments
7. Interaction between registered users — Following other users, chat with other users, etc.,
8. New content discovery (i.e., how much new type of content the user is consuming on average)
9. Content sharing metrics
10. Advertisement views on different formats and types of content and Advertisement click-through rate

Summary

So, since the user journey starts from the discovery of the website, the capturing of metrics should start from there and continue to capture metrics at various steps that are prone to break or that can be improved further. These metrics can also be used to target advertisements to the intended audience.

While the above list of metrics is in no way complete, these paint a picture of what type of metrics need to be captured. Also, do not forget that the metrics that you capture must be aligned with your goals for the product.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure!