I was very lucky to have worked at HubSpot during a pivotal transition in its evolution. I managed a team of Product Analysts and data scientists, and we were charged with improving our product and the overall customer experience. We did this by analyzing what our customers did in our product.

This isn’t helpful when you are a brand new startup without a product. At that stage, you should be sitting with your customers or talking to them all the time. You should be taking advantage of your ability to do things that don’t scale.

Once you have more users than you can speak with, behavioral analytics are crucial to being successful. I often have conversations with people that aren’t sure how to apply data enhanced methodologies when launching new features. They bring up a good point:

How are you supposed to leverage behavioral analytics when the feature doesn’t exist?

It’s a good question. At this stage of your lifecycle, your most important task is to speak with customers that may be a good fit for what you want to build. While you may not have people using this new feature yet, there are usually groups of people who could use it within your existing user base. You just need to find the right people to speak with.

These are the types of questions I ask:

• Which of your existing users are most likely to use the new feature?
• What characteristics do those users have?
• What actions are they taking?
• Do you know why they’re taking the actions they are and whether this new feature would be useful to them?

Take advantage of the existing users you have and their patterns of usage. If you’re building a new feature or iterating on an existing one, it’s helpful to understand the high-intensity users or the infrequent users. They are a goldmine of information and you’d be crazy if you didn’t ask them for feedback.

Talk to your existing high intensity users and your infrequent users, they are a goldmine of information. You’d be crazy to ignore their feedback when building something new.

I typically push PMs / researchers / marketers to spend 30 minutes looking at their analytics system to pick out a group of people they want to speak with. I think that anyone involved in building new products is already overloaded with too many tasks, and this can easily feel like unnecessary work or an endless process that will take too much time. I think the key is to timebox this type of analysis and have it point you in the right direction.

I agree with this Intercom post that more than half of a PM’s time should be spent understanding customers’ problems, doing research, and thinking about how design can be applied to those problems. In order to spend that time most effectively, I think behavioral analytics systems are crucial to making sure you maximize that time and understand what your existing users are doing.