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Data-Driven Product Management The Guide to Building Better Products With Data 201902 Data-Driven Product Management

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Page 1: Data-Driven Product Management - Periscope Datapages.periscopedata.com/rs/299-AWK-445/images/pd...make decisions Periscope Data: Data-Driven Product Management 3. Solving Organizational

Data-DrivenProductManagementThe Guide to Building Better Products With Data

2019

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ContentSolving Organizational Alignment Problems with Data

4 Ways Data Powers Successful Product ManagementMake the right data easily accessible

Communication with stakeholders

A/B Testing

Product adoption and usage tracking

Increase the Business Impact of Product Decisions

How Periscope Uses Periscope for Product ManagementOngoing KPI monitoring

Specific feature tracking

Specific questions and one-off requests

Conclusion

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Product management leaders are charged with defining and executing product vision, strategy and a roadmap that drives revenue. It’s a position that not only represents the customer’s voice for the company, but regularly touches a lot of cross-functional teams. On a daily basis, this team needs to come up with solutions for new challenges and has a persistent need to prioritize new feature requests against the roadmap and backlog. Those decisions have a direct correlation to revenue and customer experience. In order to make product decisions effectively, it’s imperative to perform advanced data analysis.

In this guide, we will share best practices to help product management teams increase their business impact. We’ll also share tips from our own product management team about using data for effective prioritization and improved cross-functional partnerships. We’ll even share examples of the dashboards we’ve created to answer the most important product questions.

Source: https://bi-survey.com/data-driven-decision-making-business

Believe data is important for decision making today or will be in the future67%

57% Use data to predict behavior and trends, or plan to do so in the future

Product teams are adopting data as a better way to make decisions

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Solving Organizational Alignment Problems with Data

Product managers are in a unique position with regards to data. They have access to data about how a product is being used, which is great for backward-looking evaluation of product decisions. Because product decisions have direct impact on other teams’ metrics, that information can also be valuable as a means of helping other teams become more data-centric and achieve their own goals.

Before we discuss specific tactics for product managers, let’s take a step back and examine the organization as a whole. Regardless of the decision-making process or structure of an organization, there should always be at least one important high-level metric that a company is trying to achieve.

It’s crucial that leaders from every team have access to a consistent dataset that joins product, sales, marketing, customer data to track progress toward that important KPI. For a lot of businesses, that one important metric is revenue. Companies at various stages of growth might choose to focus on hitting a certain number of total users, retaining a certain percentage of existing customers or something else.

Whatever stage a company is in, leadership should be setting very public goals around this critical KPI. At Periscope Data, the entire company has access to what we call “The State of Periscope” and every employee can log in and view it at any time. It’s also displayed on screens around the office, so we get used to seeing the goals and monitoring progress toward achieving them.

This top-level KPI alignment is also crucial to the way product managers collaborate with other teams. Rather than discussing a one-off feature request based on anecdotes, product teams should analyze the request and reframe data for these partnerships around that top-level KPI.

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For instance, the product team should put together a dashboard that both the product and customer success can use to more directly address that top-level goal: Which features will maximize the number of users by improving stickiness and preventing churn?

From there, a dashboard can be created to track progress and both teams can use that shared information to make future decisions. Not only is this a more effective way for a product team to prioritize projects that move the company in the right direction, it also builds trust and credibility with the internal teams.

The same can be done with other teams, but the process should look similar — start at the high-level KPI then determine what specific cross-team goals can contribute to that KPI. Once that has been decided, a dashboard can be created to track progress and both teams can use that shared information to make decisions. This is an easy way to narrow focus down to just the projects that move the company in the right direction.

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4 Ways Data Powers Successful Product Management

As a strategy, using data to make better product decisions seems like a no-brainer, but when it comes to finding tactical uses for that information, even a seasoned data professional can have trouble turning data into actionable tasks.

The range of data that is relevant to a product manager is incredibly wide and no two companies are exactly the same with regard to their data inputs and needs. Some information (i.e. new feature adoption) is proprietary to product management, but other metrics (i.e. retention, time spent in product) need more context before they connect directly to a product.

To do product management well, there’s a lot of data to take into account, and it comes from a wide variety of sources. It’s all useful in some way, but it is most impactful if it can be wrangled into one place to maximize the data for important decisions, and to paint a full picture. To effectively use data to make product decisions, you need a solution that connects to all the data sources, allows you to analyze and share results with the right people at the right time. Here are a few of the key reasons why a sophisticated analytics platform is the most important part of a product manager’s decision-making process.

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The biggest benefit of a analytics platform is that information from any number of different inputs can be combined into one place where anyone from that organization can access it for analysis. With all of the inputs plugged into a single source of truth, product managers can find any data they need to make decisions. With live connections to the source, the information is always current so there’s no worry about when it was extracted or concerns about version issues.

At Periscope Data, our team of data experts partners with product managers to build a holistic view of our campaigns. For example, they might combine data from our product, Salesforce, and Marketo to understand how an upsell campaign to our customer base impacted new feature adoption.

That data team is responsible for maintaining the data connec-tions and ETL from our various sources running properly. They also clean and model the data to make sure it is usable for the product team and the rest of the org. Having a team like that prepare the data means product managers have a lot more time to explore the data to look for trends, outliers, goal-specific met-rics or any other a-ha insights. It also means product managers can be certain that the data they are analyzing has been verified and the assumptions checked, so they don’t need to double check sources and business logic for accuracy.

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Make the right data easily accessible

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A lot of product decisions require a series of small changes that add up to optimize a customer’s experience and productivity. Making decisions about those changes is very difficult to do in a vacuum. Product managers usually have good instincts, but it’s not enough to just make a decision and leave it. Good product teams are always looking at data to see the effects of their decisions. One of the main tools that product managers use to evaluate those changes is A/B testing.

In order to do those A/B tests right, product teams need a data platform that is connected to the relevant data that needs to be measured and that can compute the required statistical metrics. A lot of these decisions are made in a very short window of time

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A/B testing

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Communication with stakeholders

Product data is critical to the success of the entire organization and is used by all teams to improve operations and drive strat-egy. The product is the primary way (the only way in most cases) that most customers engage with a company, so that data is vital to almost every part of an organization. Because of this, product managers generally have a lot of stakeholders who create and consume data; they all make data-based decisions on a regular basis. It’s not a sustainable solution to have one person (or even a small team) in charge of downloading information, preparing it on a local device and then upload or send to all the various stakeholders.

The best way to distribute that information is to work on a shared platform that allows a product manager to own the information and visualizations of relevant data and then invite stakeholders to view that data through the platform or set up regular reports to be delivered automatically. This way, permis-sions can be managed so that each one has exactly the access they need and the product manager can distribute information on time with little additional effort. With Periscope Data, charts or dashboards can be created then shared with the right stake-holders. The data updates automatically and any coworker with the right access can dig into the data on their own. It’s the best workflow for everyone involved.

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These KPIs are the holy grail of product management metrics. This data is worth tracking on a daily basis. For every feature and update that is launched, it’s crucial to keep an eye on how how it is performing, who is using it, how they are using it, how long they are using it, etc. These numbers need to be tracked in aggregate and also broken down across customer account, industry, company size, job function and more. Any of those met-ric breakdowns can also be shown across different time periods, compounding the number of charts to track even further. Usage and adoption metrics can be tied to win rates, trial conversions, retention, upsells, etc.

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Reporting on product metrics

right after a new update has been released, so the data has to be made available quickly. Fast data by itself isn’t useful unless the product managers reviewing that information can be assured that it’s accurate. There are many pitfalls to A/B testing, so it’s imperative that product managers can trust that it’s valid.

In summary, there’s a lot of measuring that needs to go on. Every product manager has different goals, but the value of the data they process is limitless. To make the most of it, you need a tool that gets accurate information to the right people at the right time.

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At Periscope Data, when there is a feature request, our VP of Product runs an ad hoc analysis on the customers and prospects who have asked for this feature. That way, our entire team can assess the revenue impact before committing product resources. This helps our company understand the impact of the product better and focuses the entire team on delivering maximum value to the business.

“We used to just release new features and look at simple stats from Google Analytics, or just talk to clients anecdotally about how they liked them. Now, our product manager pulls Periscope Data reports for our bi-weekly meetings that look at a feature we released to measure adoption over time against our goals. It helps our marketing, product and client experience teams really work together and improve our experience.”

Claire Moloney Growth Manager, LeafLink

Increase the Business Impact of Product Decisions

Example

The sales team asks the product team to build specific functionality to win a large customer. The product manager needs to decide whether this feature has enough impact to the business over the long run to move in front of other features that are already in the backlog.

Solution

The product team should blend product engagement data with Salesforce data to get a better understanding of how broadly profitable that feature will be. This enables product managers to quantify the business impact of new feature requests. That number can be compared against other requests, which makes prioritizing more effectively and ultimately increases the business impact of the overall product.

Product management leaders and teams are often constrained by time and resources, which drives a constant need to prioritize — what to focus on, what to deprioritize and when to do so.

However, customer-facing teams (sales, CS, support, etc) have many urgent product-related requests, often times based on one-off anecdotes. It is difficult for product managers to get enough accurate data to assess the business impact of feature requests, making it challenging for the PM to prioritize.

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How Periscope Uses Periscope for Product ManagementPeriscope is a data company, so we tend to rely pretty heavily on data to make the best product management decisions. We rely mostly on three types of dashboards that pull mostly quantitative data to provide summaries of large datasets. Here’s a quick rundown of each:

The goals of a product manager are the same as the goals of the entire company: retain current customers, attract new ones, increase product usage, etc. It’s vital to a product manager to keep an eye on the top-level business metrics. At Periscope Data, this data comes from Salesforce (sales data), our production database (user activity data) and our team of analysts (custom-created enhanced metrics). This type of monitoring always looks at aggregate numbers rather than any specific drilldown or segmentation; the goal is to view the whole product and the whole user base to keep a pulse on the way they move together.

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Ongoing KPI Monitoring

Example: Ongoing KPI MonitoringThis dashboard tracks high-level KPIs and goals that the entire product team is working to achieve. These metrics track the overall performance of the company, but each product manager and each feature have an impact on their movement.

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Every day our product managers get an email from the Periscope Data platform that delivers these dashboards. They can usually get all of the information they need from that email, with the option to click into the dashboards to dig deeper when something looks out of place. When they scan those dashboards, they’re usually looking for any numbers that stand out as unexpected.

A lot of the hard work of product management goes into the building, launching and optimizing features that solve specific use cases of our customers. To do that well, our product managers need to create dashboards that track features starting at high-level adoption and drilling down to the actions of individual companies and users.

At Periscope, we rely heavily on the data team to ensure that data is being treated properly and producing the best insights. For example, when we launched Data Discovery for Business, we worked with our data team to build a dashboard to tell product managers everything about the adoption of that new feature: which customers were using it, how many individual users were building vizualizations, how many charts were they creating, what types of charts they were creating, what job functions were using the new feature the most. We tracked all of it, right down to the nitty gritty. To create these dashboards, our product team and our data team discussed the questions that need answered and built a data infrastructure to answer them.

Specific Feature Tracking

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Example: Specific Feature TrackingWhen a new feature is released, a separate dashboard should be made to track its performance. Here, the product manager can track revenue, adoption, popularity and more to both quantify the feature’s success and get an idea of how customers are using it.

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Like in the first use case, our product managers get daily emails that present these reports, but in this case, those emails are just the start of their daily exploration. When those reports come in, product managers instantly click into the Periscope Data plat-form to begin digging for more information. They can hover over any part of the charts or open them to get more information. It’s vital to product management that they keep thinking of new questions and monitoring progress on a granular level to ensure success.

Like any other function at a company, product management work is very rarely contained to a limited range of tasks; they collaborate with a lot of different teams and need a way to manage one-off requests efficiently. Sometimes that means sorting the customer base in a certain way to identify a specific customer or set of customers for a beta test. They might need data to answer a specific question about a feature that wouldn’t otherwise be a part of the regular monitoring. The range of questions that need to be answered is unlimited, so they need a way to build answers and track their status.

For example, consider a company that is about to release a beta feature and wants to find the best customers to include. They could combine information about customer size, usage, health score, payments and more to determine quickly whether that company is a good candidate. The product team and a data analyst can work together to create a quick and accurate way of locating the right customers.

Specific Questions and One-Off Requests

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Example: One-off RequestTo see if a customer should be included in a new feature beta, a data analyst can create a dashboard that will allow a product manager to determine if they are a good fit. This dashboard can also be duplicated to quickly compare potential candidates.

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Conclusion

About Periscope DataPeriscope Data is an end-to-end BI and analytics platform for anyone looking to answer complex questions with data. Business professionals and data experts use Periscope Data everyday to connect all of their data sources, then analyze, visualize and share insights. The platform offers the fastest time to insight, unmatched power and the flexibility to meet the demands of every part of the business. Periscope Data is trusted by more than 1,000 customers, including Adobe, Crunchbase, EY, Flexport and ZipRecruiter.

Your product management team should be using data to unlock insights about your customers and the way they interact with your product. With a tool like Periscope Data, product managers can optimize the business impact of their product, make prioritization decisions more effectively and improve cross-functional collaboration and conversations.

If you have any questions about how your team can use Periscope Data to improve product management, you can also contact us to set up a call with one of our experts.

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