Jan 15, 2021 | by Budi Tanrim
User metrics - Vision
Do you feel like your team track meaningless metrics?
Metrics like daily active users, churn, or transactions are often used to monitor a product. It’s a good starting point. For example, if you see an increase in user churn (dropping out) from your product, you can start plan to act on it.
But, that is a reactive approach to design a product.
You wait until the problem occurs then act.
What if your team can be more proactive? Always question what value users get from our product. And proactively deliver better value before an issue like a user churning out occurs.
This is where user metrics can help. To do this, there are 3 major steps:
- Align on the vision for the user
- Define the signal
- Define the metrics
Align on the vision
You may cringe when you hear the word vision.
Yuck, that slogan-y beautiful yet meaningless words.
But when done well, vision can really align your team in the longer term. We are aiming for an inspiring and meaningful statement to help us understand where we are going in the long run. This will be your team’s intent.
If you prefer a workshop format, here’s the breakdown:
- Generate who: Who is our target user? (5 min)
- Generate what: What do we want to enable them? (5 min)
- Group similar themes (10 min)
- Vote who and what (6 min)
- Generate wow: If we do an excellent job at that, how our users’ life will change? (5 min)
- Vote wow (6 min)
A few tips:
My team doesn’t know who our users are. In this case, it’s okay to put an assumption about who is the target users, but make sure to educate the team that your team really needs to align on that. You can collaborate with the business team to see the market-size and market condition.
Be ambitious. The wow should be ambitious. If it sounds too pessimistic and not inspiring, consider being the devil’s advocate. Ask a question like: Is this an exciting vision for us and our users?
Use your insights and data. If you have done some studies and data, consider using and incorporate. I like to put the data or key insights on the whiteboard to inspire people when they generate what and wow.
This exercise will give you a simple statement that is very user-focused. You should ask your team this question: What would be the signal if we achieve this vision?
In the next post, we’ll explore how to convert your vision into signals.
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