Multi-product companies are bursting with growth potential.
But product leaders and managers know how challenging it can be to keep that growth moving in the right direction. If you aren’t intentional and rooted in a clear strategy, it’s easy to fracture your company, drift into silos, and run into a host of growth challenges.
However, there are tried-and-true ways for product leaders to use analytics to drive multi-product growth. In this article, we examine the biggest issues multi-product companies face and nail down how to use analytics to promote product growth across the organization.
What are some examples of multi-product companies?
Multi-product companies are businesses that branch out to include products beyond their core offering. For growth-focused multi-product companies, the path to success tends to be universal: Use multiple products to drive growth without losing touch with the company’s most successful core elements.
Some of the biggest examples of multi-product companies are Apple and Microsoft. These giants are constantly adding, upgrading, and maintaining multiple product offerings while balancing a loyal customer following.
What are the biggest challenges facing multi-product companies?
Although multi-product companies have the chance to reach a broader range of customers, they also face common challenges as they grow. Here are a few:
- New products can drift off course. Diluting core messages or the brand is a major concern for multi-product companies. If you’re not careful, the new products you launch may stray away from the brand or qualities that make your company valuable.
- Users are forgotten. Losing touch with the customer base is easy to do as products grow. The more tentacles you build through new products or features, the more you risk branching away from the original needs of users. Without consistently gauging user sentiment and behaviors, new products may fall out of step with your customers.
- Direction becomes unclear. As multi-product companies grow, it’s not always easy to know when or how to expand or launch new products. For product leaders and managers who receive feedback from all directions, it can be especially hard to pin down a direction for product roadmaps in these multipronged companies.
- User expectation gaps emerge. Especially with multi-product companies, if customers carry expectations from core products to secondary products, it can cause expectation gaps—a recipe for dissatisfied and frustrated users.
How can multi-product companies benefit from analytics?
In order to launch growth through each new product offering, it takes a solid foundation to take off from. Analytics provide that stable launchpad. Here’s how analytics and Gainsight PX help multi-product companies overcome challenges:
You stay in touch with users.
PX makes it easier to align your products with users in two key ways:
- You can rally around user-based metrics. With Gainsight PX, you can view dashboards that monitor your most important product KPIs. Those metrics provide a light to guide your whole team, departments, and stakeholders in the same direction.
- You can use the user experience to fuel your decisions. Because you can dig into user feedback as well as in-product behavioral analytics, Gainsight PX makes it easy to understand your users’ needs and objectives. That insight can fuel your product roadmap decisions and shed light on ROI.
Replicate your best product experiences.
In multi-product companies, your teams are racing to build products and features that users will love. Unfortunately, users don’t always know how to use your best features right away, or they may not know they exist at all. Gainsight PX makes it easy to see where users are stumbling within your products, and it reveals places to reduce friction. By diving into user habits and user paths, you can see if users are taking extra steps to get to sticky features. From there, you can identify the barriers and intervene with in-app engagements, checklists, or guides.
Prepare for more successful launches.
To unlock growth in multi-product companies, you need to perfect product and feature launches. That means understanding user needs, testing, and improving. Gainsight PX gives you the tools to do all of the above. You can examine user preferences and use that information to back your product roadmap decisions.
From there, it’s easy to see how well a new feature is performing right away, and you can even break down metrics based on big-picture goals, such as onboarding, engagement, or retention. That all sets your team up for more successful product launches and a better user experience.
Up your segmentation game.
As we mentioned, a major challenge of managing multi-product growth is losing touch with your users. Gainsight PX has built-in tools to help you tap into deeper user segments and fully understand users for all of your products.
Additionally, you can use surveys and in-app engagements to embed customer feedback loops in your product. These tools help you launch new products and immediately understand how well they fit your target users—or identify where you need to pivot.
Deliver personalized product experiences with a product-led strategy
Driving a powerful product experience is a must in order to succeed in today’s market. Download our ebook, Mastering Product Experience in SaaS to learn real product-led growth strategies used by SaaS leaders as well as best practices to capitalize on your product as a primary go-to-market channel.
