Product analytics are crucial when it comes to optimizing performance, diagnosing and eliminating errors, and adding long-term value to a product, allowing product teams to expand the life cycle of a product well beyond its initial launch.
What is the role of product analytics?
- Product analytics are critical to a product’s life cycle, allowing product managers to continually optimize and add value to the product.
Product analytics play a massive role in measuring a product’s performance over time, allowing product teams and all stakeholders to receive clear, identifiable user interaction factors in real time. They are especially useful for product optimization and help teams to identify opportunities where improvements can be made to the product. Development teams can then create a new iteration of the product that addresses these opportunities for release at a future date. This process is repeated many times over the course of a product’s life cycle, producing a consistent influx of value for the customer and the business.
Perhaps most importantly, directors of analytics, product analytics managers, product managers, data analysts and engineers are able to troubleshoot functionality issues or errors within a product by looking for metrics with unexpected or nonexistent performance indicators. Teams are more equipped to identify what part of the product may not be working and to find a solution through further testing and iteration.
Why do we need product analytics?
- Product analytics are what determines if a product is successful after its launch and is sustaining growth in the marketplace.
These analytics come in a variety of forms and can be used to identify factors like how many users are utilizing the product, which aspects of the product they interact with the most or least, how often or how long they interact with the product, if the product is retaining users, if the user base is growing, and many others. That information can be used to shape the growth of the product over time as well, identifying areas where features may need to be optimized or where growth opportunities may be present.
What does a product analytics manager do?
Product analytics managers work with large data sets to build complex statistical models that learn from data and solve business challenges while measuring product performance.
Product analytics managers are the primary stakeholders in gathering data for research and analysis. These team members perform analysis to derive product insights while weighing opportunities for improvements. Most product analytics managers utilize quantitative techniques to develop statistical models, machine learning models and deep learning models that learn from traditional and non-traditional data to support business needs and unlock new opportunities for products to grow.
Product analytics managers should also possess marketing savvy, the ability to understand big data, keen presentation skills, coding experience, an understanding of customer behavior, knowledge of business requirements and data-driven decision making skills in order to consistently deliver value to customers. Unique product analytics positions are still relatively rare, but this team member also provides the ability to quickly and continuously improve a product.
