So how are we tracking this?
We’ve all been there. It’s the day before release, the new feature is looking great, but no one really thought about the tracking. Oops.
It happens, you get so focused on the concept that what happens after it goes live is a bit of a blur that you’ll “get to later”. The problem is, if you see this happening more often than not, then chances are that changes are being made without an objective or vision in mind. This means the pieces of the puzzle will never come together to form the bigger picture. It’s better to know something is going badly and be able to improve it, than to not know at all. In fact, knowing exactly what’s going on and tackling it is the beauty of Product Development.
So how are we tracking this?
It all comes down to why the changes are being made in the first place. With every change to your product these are the questions you should be asking yourself before even considering a design (and by every change I mean every-single-change):
- What are my objectives?
- How will these objectives be measured?
- If measuring these objectives needs Engineering, is that something I need to get done first?
- Is there an existing report that can be used or does a new one have to be created?
- Is there enough supporting historical data?
Tracking goes from having basic click events firing to your web analytics, to having the data structured in a way that reporting on it won’t make your BI resign. It will be any piece of data you need to understand if what you changed improved your customers’ journey and reached business objectives, and ideally you should have it from Day 1.
If the data says you succeeded — celebrate.
If the data says you failed — celebrate!
And from both, just carry on growing.
