Jan 14, 2021 | by Budi Tanrim
User metrics - Overview
“OK, our daily active users look great,” Adam said.
Adam is the product manager in one of the teams I led. He obsessed with metrics. He often starts the weekly discussion with metrics. But none of those metrics matters for this team’s context.
I joined the team when they’re in the middle of discovering what’s the best solution we can deliver to solve our users’ problem.
Our vision is to give people easy access to financial markets.
The issue with metrics like active users, retention, or monthly transacting users only indicates that X amount of people do something, which cools for business. But it doesn’t help the team understand whether they deliver value to the users.
Especially during an early stage of the product, the team should ask a different question: Are we giving the value we promise to our users? This can be seen in the value proposition statement.
Felt weird about this, I started to talk with a few key peoples.
“We need to track better metrics that show us if we actually deliver value to our users,” I said. “If our vision is to give people easy access to financial markets. What is the signal that indicates we deliver that vision?”
The team agreed to look into this and they did a quick alignment workshop.
A week later, the team started to track metrics to show how much financial growth each user got from time to time. To answer this: Do our users gain more money?
Even though these metrics are not perfect, it still much better than a meaningless number of active users. It helps the team to monitor the value they promise to deliver to the users. If we help the user gain more money, naturally, our business will gain from it.
The team starts to have users as their anchor. This enables them to have more focused evaluative research as well. To thrive in the discovery phase.
From: how many people use our app
Into: how many people we empower
Being human-centric can be reflected at various levels. In this case, we become human-centric on the strategical level.
Let’s explore the way you can do this in the next post.
(The name and the detail of the story is altered but drawn from my experience)
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