I love building new products. Ever since I was building junky web apps as a geeky high schooler, I always get excited the first time something actually works. It has always felt like magic. Now that I’m older, I increasingly feel the pressure of showing my impact. After the initial euphoria passes, I now immediately measure the metrics that represent success. Something that has been bothering me lately is that regardless of your methodology (waterfall, agile, scrum, burndown, trello anarchy, etc), I never hear others talk enough about product success metrics.

When I joined HubSpot I learned from many others about behavioral analytics. Sadly, I find myself constantly fighting responses when I speak with friends in the industry such as:

  • “We forgot to add tracking”
  • “We want to ship it and see how it does”
  • “We don’t have any specific goals for this release other than to improve the design”
  • “What should we measure?”
  • “We can’t afford to use behavioral analytics, it’s too expensive”

This is how I want to react every time I hear one of those answers:

A guy in a panda suit breaks a computer on someone's desk

Just kidding. I am always asking questions to understand the rationale so I can try to help add perspective.

These are the tough questions I want to ask in response:

  • What’s more expensive? A behavioral analytics system or shipping the wrong features / wasting the time of your product and engineering team?
  • If you hear feedback from a couple of customers, is that representative of all users?
  • How do you know that the users are actually doing what they say they’re doing?
  • Do you think you’ll get a team’s best work if the only goal is to release their work?
  • What do you think will garner more resources in the future? “We improved the experience, just look at it!” vs. “I increased conversion rates of signup to value by 10%, with an expected lift in revenue of Y”.

I don’t think you need to spend weeks off in a corner crunching numbers to come up with the answers to these questions. My suggestion is to spend 30 minutes thinking about a goal, why you’re working on something, and then a simple mechanism to measure success.

I push teams to answer these questions:

  1. What represents success for this release/feature?
  2. What is the current baseline?
  3. What is the hypothetical ceiling of improvement?
  4. Given the baseline and ceiling, how much do you think you can improve the metric?
  5. What will be the mechanism to track success/failure?
  6. When should you evaluate progress?

You don’t have to be super fancy and build Excel models, but at least spend 15-30 minutes thinking through the basics for a new feature. Regardless if you’re building something brand new or iterating on an old feature, I always think it’s worth considering the above questions.

As the saying goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.