App Metrics Every Product Manager
Should Love and Use

If you're a Product Manager, Releasecat App Metrics should become one of your core tools when making the most important decision in your job:

What's next?

Setting the direction for further product development is a critical part of product management. Put simply: the product's success depends on it. And while it may seem obvious that a good Product Manager knows their product well enough to make the right calls, let's pause for a moment and ask an uncomfortable question. Do they really?

Let's assume you're responsible for developing a photo-editing app. It offers many key features. You've just released a new version that introduces a brand-new capability: AI supported image upsizing. Let's say it allows users to enlarge photos almost infinitely, with virtually no loss in quality.

During product planning, you're discussing what to do next. Someone speaks up and says that since launching this feature, you've received as many as 20 direct emails and phone calls praising it and suggesting you add a similar feature: image downsizing.

At this point, everyone in the room agrees that:

  • the new feature received positive feedback,
  • users expect it to be expanded and have clearly suggested the next direction.

Based on this information, the Product Manager decides to green-light work on a new feature: AI supported image downsizing. The decision is signed off, management is informed, and—feeling good about the call—the Product Manager:

  • books time for the development team,
  • pulls in the rest of the team, because of course: design work is needed, documentation must be updated, announcements prepared, acceptance tests planned, and so on.

It looks like nothing else will happen in the product for the next few weeks. The team is now fully committed. Which is to say: blocked, busy building a largely pointless and arguably unnecessary feature. The Product Manager has just burned company money and reduced the chances of success for the very product they're responsible for.

Wait—what?

So what should a Product Manager do in this hypothetical situation? Maybe they should say something like this:

"Hold on a second. We've implemented a metrics collection system for our product. The data shows that since the launch of the new feature we're talking about, it has been used a total of 1,150 times over two weeks by all users combined—probably partly during initial testing. At the same time, we can see that the most frequently used feature in the app is changing the folder where photos are saved. That folder-change feature was used 750,000 times in the same two-week period. This strongly suggests that this is where we should focus and ask ourselves a simple question: do users really need to change the default folder this often? Maybe instead of working on image downsizing, we should consider remembering the last selected folder rather than always opening the default one. I have a feeling this might be what's frustrating our users the most right now. As for downsizing images—we can come back to it once we have more data from future periods and can analyze the trends."

At this point, someone from the team will probably add something like: "But it's been working this way for two years and nobody complained." emote We've all heard that one, right?

Exactly.

Business knowledge, experience, market understanding, user feedback, and yes — intuition — are all undeniably important supporting tools for a Product Manager. We believe, however, that this is exactly what they should be: supporting tools. Wherever possible, decisions should be made based on hard data (even if that data isn't always what people want to hear).

Releasecat App Metrics is a tool that delivers exactly that: hard data about how your application is actually being used. At a cost that's practically negligible compared to how much money is often spent in all the wrong places.

Read next: