Traditionally, businesses would scale and evaluate their success on the basis of financial criteria. Coherently, sales and marketing used to be the prominent, most treasured, and most challenged departments. Today, the concepts of agility, customer journey, and interconnection are key to building a successful niche in most industries. Understandably, the mobile app performance metrics deployed to read the performance of businesses have not only increased in quantity but also split into variables. This is partially because other departments are also more acknowledged to be equally significant, as one of the fundamentals of “agile” approaches. This approach is very well-received in the SaaS landscape, and product management metrics for SaaS products have developed within this mentality. Let’s dive in to see what they are and where they stand.
Implementing the Agile Approach
Brands that are conformant with digital age necessities are more familiar with the above concepts. A different mindset that is open to varieties also brought responsibilities to all business departments, along with new opportunities.
The digital transformation brought about additional requirements while opening up new domains. Consequently, departments had to come up with their genuine values to keep up with them.
Since business and customer success are byproducts of them altogether, the emergence of new metrics is so natural. Now they expand across teams, and this is fundamental for agility.
In terms of agile approaches, their implementation helps SaaS developers to tailor their products, which provides them with the flexibility to adapt to current industry dynamics. Using these compatible metrics had the most significant impact on the work processes, including how products are being developed and released. Since agile practices have an overall process optimization effect, it helps “mature” companies. “Agile mature” companies, as a result, become flexible to such an extent that metrics become part of their ways of doing things.
Leveraging Data to Adopt Product Management Metrics
Some Agile approaches for SaaS define a set of metrics, which make things easier for the teams. With metrics, they can identify issues early, which will reduce revisions and determine priorities better.
This not only delivers value with the ongoing cases but also provides a knowledge base for future projects. Through this, teams can improve the planning of new products. They will also spare themselves from deviations, and eventually contribute to increased customer success.
In the context of mobile product development, this flexibility is possible by product management metrics.
SaaS and mobile app markets are hot spots, overflowing with data, and buzzwords to describe these very trends. Finding our way amidst the jargon – KPIs, metrics, analytics, etc. is not easy. However, it’s easy to fall into the trap of adopting these fancy buzzwords without getting the gist of them.
Our aim is to guide you to have an understanding and feel to them, so you will be able to select the right data to track. This way, you will be able to choose the ones that mean the most for your unique business dynamics.
Coming Up with What’s Meaningful
We have already emphasized the importance of a single stance and seamless communication across departments. It is not just the finance departments that are responsible for the bottom-line revenue. The above trends shift the burden from these departments’ shoulders and distribute it across channels. Today customer success of a product relies on a whole orchestra. The product manager becomes the lead and holds a key role here.
Before, direct communication with customers used to be the responsibility of sales or customer service. Today, product managers will find great benefit by being a part of this direct communication. It doesn’t happen in the traditional sense, obviously. Actually, novelties like AnnounceKit emerge out of this very need. These dialogues may happen directly or by digital means like our app.
And the reflection of these dialogues on the work processes happens through metrics and KPIs for an App.
Inarguably, market, and current trends knowledge is a must-have for a product manager. However, today they need to have the skills to determine and deploy the relevant metrics and KPIs. These are commonly customer acquisition costs, customer conversion rate, daily active users, features usage, user churn, Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, etc.
As the names of the metrics suggest, the whole business talks about a niche customer market that requires a precise definition. And with the market dynamics, we would all agree that there is no long-lasting stable definition. If defining is step one, executing it is another world. It’s about building a product that truly addresses the needs of your niche.
This cannot be possible without precise definitions, and it can only happen through data and customer feedback.
Product Management Metrics for Mobile Product Managers
However, it’s a mountain of customer care and product metrics out there, and it is a great part of the product manager’s role to focus on the relevant metrics. Looking at the routines of product managers will definitely help us narrow down the necessary metrics. This leads us to pay the utmost attention to the customer activity and engagement category. However, there’s more to that. Focusing too much on daily or monthly changes should not prevent us from having a broader view. For this, the vast variety of product management metrics across various categories are:
Customer Activity and Engagement Metrics
What does “engagement” mean in the way we define it? Every app is unique, the goals and the metrics to reach them should therefore be unique. To understand this, we have to come up with our own questions and aim for the answers that will build up our genuine pattern.
How frequently do customers use the app? Is there a meaningful pattern to the gaps between user visits?
What’s the most commonly used product feature? By whom? Is it preferred mostly by individuals or organizations? This indeed will tell something.
Also, how much time do customers typically spend with our product in a single session?
The relevant metrics here are:
Downloads
Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Daily Active Users (DAU)
Session Length
Session Interval
Time In-App
In-App Actions
Conversion and Retention Metrics
These could be the hardest ones to articulate, but two crucial ones since they are directly linked to the best customer journey.
Again, you have to be true while contemplating some questions. What value do we offer to turn trial users into loyal customers? What makes them consider paying, or leave? To achieve retention, what kind of a customer journey are we offering? What do we expect from a loyal customer, and what cost do we need to invest in creating one?
The metrics in question here are:
Conversion rate
Churn
Retention
Cost Per Loyal Customer
Revenue Metrics
Decision-making for revenue goals is at the executive level by nature, but this does not mean you don’t have anything to offer in return. With revenue metrics, you will be able to pitch in with how much your product will bring in:
Download Revenue (for Paid Apps)
In-App Revenue
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Team Metrics
Are every member of your team on the same page? We tend to forget to look at our closest whereabouts if the business is going well in numbers. However, not everything is about numbers. It’s valuable to invest time in defining your team’s “happiness metrics” as well:
Quality of Features Released
Timing of Features Released
Team Sentiment
Customer Segmentation and Growth
Your customers can be individuals or organizations. You can derive great data from both, looking at their behavior patterns. But ask these questions first:
What’s our user profile, both for individuals and organizations? How can we segment them and on which basis? How many of these profiles joined us over a certain time period?
Below metrics are useful in defining these very profiles.
User/Organization Name
Tier
Industry
Country
Count of Collaborators by Job Function (e.g. product manager, marketer, developer, etc.) and role (administer, collaborator, etc.)
Count of iOS and Android Apps
Announcekit.app for Communication All-Across
Communication encouraging interconnection directly influences future retention. A successful customer journey actually starts with initial interactions. Announcekit.app brings value by converting feedbacks into meaningful data.
You can read our previous post on https://announcekit.app/blog/changelog-vs-release-notes
