You are raising a very interesting question around metrics that can truly represent level of customer success from product lens. It’s also a very interesting point of a greater usage not always meaning customers finding greater value.
I agree the relevance of the metrics is tightly connected to the workflow and the use case. It feels that the product success metrics should be somehow connected to the customers purchase / renewal behavior of the product but it also means a connection with the customers business metric. Those however is something product teams likely don’t have access to meaning this likely should be a hypothesis area for product teams to build on
I assume this means a need in somehow integrating product analytics into some sort of a customer analytics / financial reporting tool or at least frequent conversations with people who have visibility into that kind of analytics. For instance, we have pendo integrated with customer overview tool that allows seeing all products a customer purchased. As a result we have an opportunity to ask questions around customer outcomes based on product usage however this is purely depends on curiosity of a product manager or a customer success person now
It's tough to string the analytics together to be able to say definitively: "Feature X we built drove retention improvements by Y%."
It's more of a dotted line, or squiggly line between product and business metrics, but it's important to try. It should be the responsibility of product managers to figure this out, and to have access to the data + an understanding of how things are interconnected.
That is the golden question! What is the main value proposition? You need to be crystal clear about your value proposition first. Then the metrics are easier to find. I recommend not using metrics that are out of influence even if your product has perfect PMF.
Example: Zapier might measure the number of integrations created per customer (instead of automation runs, because that is out of influence). Even if nobody looks into the user interface for a month.
You are raising a very interesting question around metrics that can truly represent level of customer success from product lens. It’s also a very interesting point of a greater usage not always meaning customers finding greater value.
I agree the relevance of the metrics is tightly connected to the workflow and the use case. It feels that the product success metrics should be somehow connected to the customers purchase / renewal behavior of the product but it also means a connection with the customers business metric. Those however is something product teams likely don’t have access to meaning this likely should be a hypothesis area for product teams to build on
Product Teams need access to "higher level" business metrics, so they can measure if the things they're doing have an impact on key business metrics.
* Product team adds a feature and tracks its usage
* Usage is good (where they expected) - yay!
* But did that usage impact anything else; i.e. reduce churn, increase expansion revenue, etc.? If not, was adding that feature worthwhile?
I assume this means a need in somehow integrating product analytics into some sort of a customer analytics / financial reporting tool or at least frequent conversations with people who have visibility into that kind of analytics. For instance, we have pendo integrated with customer overview tool that allows seeing all products a customer purchased. As a result we have an opportunity to ask questions around customer outcomes based on product usage however this is purely depends on curiosity of a product manager or a customer success person now
It's tough to string the analytics together to be able to say definitively: "Feature X we built drove retention improvements by Y%."
It's more of a dotted line, or squiggly line between product and business metrics, but it's important to try. It should be the responsibility of product managers to figure this out, and to have access to the data + an understanding of how things are interconnected.
I agree. I work in B2B. Many B2B product automate processes and are successful when people do NOT need to use the product actively.
Thanks for sharing Benedikt.
In this case, how do you measure success / value creation? How do you know customers are happy with the product?
That is the golden question! What is the main value proposition? You need to be crystal clear about your value proposition first. Then the metrics are easier to find. I recommend not using metrics that are out of influence even if your product has perfect PMF.
Example: Zapier might measure the number of integrations created per customer (instead of automation runs, because that is out of influence). Even if nobody looks into the user interface for a month.