If you’re a product manager or product leader, you’re constantly being pummeled with feedback and pressured to improve your product. As you plan your product road map, you need to balance feedback between executives, customers, the sales team and any other stakeholders.
Product key performance indicators (KPIs) will be a lifesaver as you craft your product development road maps, laying the groundwork to support decisions. Unfortunately, not every KPI is going to add value to your plans.
As you look to save time and gain optimal focus on your product roadmap strategy, we’ll dig into the top five reports to help you balance feedback, fuel better decisions, and build your product road map.
How do you create a product road map?
A digital product road map is a master plan that lays out a shared vision about your product. It tells the story of how your product will progress over time as well as what steps you’ll need to take to mold your product to accomplish your team and company goals. Ultimately, your product road map builds a bridge between the immediate actions you’re taking now and how they’re leading toward accomplishing your company’s big-picture goals.
And product data is critical if you want to identify the best path to a better product and prove they’re the right moves for all stakeholders. This is an area where product analytics software can save you time and back your efforts … as long as you’re targeting the right reports.
What reports should you consider when building your road map?
Here are the five best reports for building your road map:
1. Funnel Analysis
Funnel analysis lets you follow users as they journey through your product. That means you can see where they’re dropping off, what’s driving the most engagement, and how they interact with features along the way.
Funnel reports let you track important interactions, measure page views, and examine how users interact with features. Advanced software will also let you measure custom events you set up as a funnel. For instance, if you want to increase purchases, you can build a report that tracks a user’s steps from your initial product offering page all the way to your shopping cart. From there, it’s easy to see where users are falling off course and make adjustments to inspire more frequent action.
2. Path Analysis
Product adoption is critical if you want all that hard work you’re putting into your product not to go to waste. And every user will follow their own track as they learn about and use your product. If you want to drive engagement, it’s essential to understand that journey and remove any roadblocks standing in the user’s way.
That’s where path analysis becomes crucial. Product path analysis shows you what steps your users are taking to learn about and get to a feature. That way, you can spot moves you didn’t anticipate, eliminate anything that’s holding up users, and see what tweaks you need to make to clear the way to higher product adoption.
3. Retention Analysis
Retention, growth and limiting customer churn is more important than ever for SaaS companies. In the U.S. alone, avoidable customer churn costs businesses more than $100 billion per year, according to CallMiner data. Retention analysis lays out what features and interactions are driving, or preventing, retention. Here are a few things retention analysis reveals:
- Retention baselines: You can set a product retention baseline and make measurements as you enhance products.
- Retention timelines: You can see how long you have to get your user’s attention and calculate the value of your product right away.
- Retention features or attributes: You can prove your hunches about winning features and spot what parts of your product are driving growth.
4. Feature Adoption Analysis
Feature adoption analysis shows you whether or not users are interacting with those features your team is working so hard to perfect. It also reveals what product features are influencing revenue growth or affecting your customer’s lifetime value.
This metric is key as you’re building your product road map because it can show you whether or not users are embracing a new feature, so you can prove the value of successful launches or uncover how to adjust your product to encourage adoption. At the same time, it reveals how new features are affecting revenue — a handy bit of info if you want to prove return on investment or secure more buy-in from stakeholders.
5. Feedback Analysis
If you want your product road map to drive positive results, incorporating feedback and boosting customer success is essential. After all, as Forbes reports, companies that earn $1 billion a year could gain an average of $700 million by investing in customer experience over a three-year span.
Feedback analysis digs into feedback from customers and provides the data you need to improve your user’s experience. Advanced software will also lay out feedback in clear dashboards. That way, you can easily pass feedback data on to other decision makers and prove your product road map is in line with the needs of customers, leads or the company as a whole.
Perfect your product management road map.
If you want to write a product management road map that pushes your product forward, it takes reports that are easy to access — and insights to back your decisions. Gainsight’s Product Analytics software gives you thorough, customizable reports on your product — all in a single, easy-to-use hub.
Download our guide that lays out the secrets to crafting a customer-centric product roadmap that enhances your users’ experience and propels growth.
