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Blog
By Jennifer DeLaRosa, Product Manager
Your product is live. The thing that has consumed your thoughts, your creative energy, and probably a sizable chunk of your money is now out in the world for people to see and judge. Do your target consumers like it? Did that workflow you agonized over prove to be intuitive? How will they rate you in the app store? After launch, it seems like all you can do is wait to see how your project is received. You probably also have a lengthy to-do list of how you want to refine your product, ideas that got left on the cutting room floor. Those first weeks after launch are exciting, but now that you’ve made your product reality, the stakes are somehow higher than ever. Your next move needs to be solid. How do you decide what to do next?
Honestly, if you’re asking this question after you’ve launched, you’re a little late to the game. Your customers will tell you from day one how you need to iterate your product, but to listen you have to have the proper tools in place before launch day. There are a number of excellent product analytics softwares that can be integrated with your app or site. These tools can track user traffic, event triggers, and conversion rates. Simply by using your product, your users can tell you much about what in your product works for them and what doesn’t. At Vault, we help you choose the analytics strategy that best fits your product.
Some products may not be suited to an analytics software. Occasionally, product performance analysis is best done with custom internal dashboards. VAULT has a history of working with a range of products in an array of industries. We understand the nuances in the story your users have to tell, and it is our standard practice to have a plan for executing your data analytics strategy well before go-live. This prepares you to be the fly on the proverbial wall as your first users step through your passion project.
Before launch, we’ll have your analytics strategy developed, integrated, or configured so that you are collecting data as soon as your product hits the market. By reviewing trends in how the users navigate your system, you can glean a better understanding of what catches your consumer’s attention and what they find easy to ignore. Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential for helping you bridge the distance between your expectation of how your product will be used and how people actually end up using it.
If you’re an ecommerce site, what is your cart abandonment rate? Perhaps your checkout workflow is too clunky. Maybe your users could use a nudging reminder that they have products ready for purchase. If your product follows a freemium to premium subscription model, what is your conversion rate of free users to paying users? Perhaps the features behind your paywall aren’t well socialized among the free users. Maybe your paid features are not as valuable as the free features. Is that cool mechanism that you worked really hard on not getting the traffic you expected? It’s possible that the interface does not adequately direct their attention to the feature.
With the data harvested from your product analytics, VAULT will assist you in picking the most logical and data-supported direction for the next iterations of your project. Your cutting room floor ideas may be exactly what the next version of your product needs, or they may be the complete opposite of what your KPI’s recommend. Either way, it’s important that your next round of resources helps your product become essential for the people you serve. Employing data trend analysis to back your iteration choices will give you confidence that your next steps advance the maturity of your project, expand functionality to better meet the consumer’s needs, and elevate your product’s value.
