(19) How to measure the success of your product features?

Most often as product managers and product owners we are building on an increment of an existing product for a release. And most times the increment is through a set of features. Although we maintain a set of metrics and KPIs to measure the success of the product with the help of tools like a product score card, we ignore to measure the success of individual features. And a lack of attention to measure the effectiveness of individual features leads to an attitude of what Marty Cagan calls as building ‘feature factories’ also called ‘feature bloat’, ‘featuritis’, or ‘feature creep’. Here’s the popular quote by Marty Cagan:

“Unsuccessful product teams most often are all feature factories, with little regard for whether or not the features actually solve the underlying business problems. Progress for them is measured by output and not outcome.” — Marty Cagan

Let’s try to understand what Cagan meant by progress being measured through output and not outcome.

Output for most product teams would read something like:

• “We completed 10 user stories in this sprint
• “We shipped four new features this month

Output here doesn’t mean anything other than measuring a volume of work. There is no measure of the impact of the very work.

Outcome on the other hand would read something like this:

• “We helped reduce 15% of our core customers time through making our workflows better”

Outcome is the measure of the impact your feature had directly to your customers.

The role of a product managers/POs is not to build features, but to enhance value. Sometime deciding upon not building a feature is sometimes more important than building a feature. How do you do that?

Metrics.

MIND YOUR METRICS

Metrics are an indicator of both health of a feature and its success.

Each of your feature goals must be aligned to the larger business goal/product goal. Even if one feature in your release is misaligned to the larger goal of the release, it reduces the effectiveness of your product.

Identifying metrics that matter

A feature’s key metrics depend upon various factors like:

• Product vision
• Business goals
• Nature of feature itself

A good idea for your feature is to cover at least two of the above metrics.

Frameworks for feature metrics

There are two frameworks that I have known to be useful to track feature success:

• Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics
• Google’s Heart Framework

Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics

Pirate Metrics are most suited for new products that is vying for discoverability and user adoption.

Google’s HEART Framework

I am a big fan of Google’s HEART framework and apply it to measure the success of the features I build at work. The HEART framework is most effective to measure the quality of User Experience. You can apply HEART to specific feature or to a whole product.

Choose one or two categories in the HEART framework that are the focus of your product or project.

How do you measure HEART?

But how do you figure out which metrics to implement and track?

The Goals Signals Metrics process facilitates the identification of meaningful metrics you’ll actually use.

CALL TO ACTION

Identify feature’s vital signs (metrics)to help you access its health and success over time

……before you begin building

…….start tracking them as early as you can.

Do let me know if you agree or disagree with my views here. Also let me know how do you measure the success of your features.