In the B2B SaaS industry, product insights are all of the data collected from user interactions with your product or service that can be summarized to inform design, user experience and functionality improvements.
Products are designed to provide customers with the outcomes, services and value that they want. Just what those requirements are and the best way to deliver them, however, is on the shoulders of product managers and product operations teams to shepherd through the development and continuous improvement processes.
While personas, drafting customer journey maps and segmentation can help to shape what the product or service looks like during the early stages, product managers have other tools, such as customer analytics, engagement metrics and surveys, available to them to help to refine a product after it is launched. Combined, often with the help of product experience software, companies can get an accurate and real-time look into how their platform is being used by customers and what can be improved. These specific findings are product insights.
Why are product insights important?
In this “age of the customer,” customers have the choice and flexibility to make changes when their current solutions are not meeting their expectations. Because of this, product managers need to be very aware of the experiences that customers are having with their product, drawn from the data that users generate and the feedback that they provide.
Product analytics, and the software that powers it, turn all of these data points into product insights that can serve as a guide to what customers are really doing with your product, for how long and what challenges they may be facing. Knowing the answers to these questions can give your company a unique and deeper perspective than what just marketing and sales techniques can provide, acting almost like a crystal ball into which decisions are on the right track and which are not.
Some product insights examples can include:
- What feature is the leading cause of user drop-off?
- Are customers using the just-released features?
- Which tools or features of the product contribute the most to the platform’s recurring revenue?
How can you maximize the identification of product insights?
Users are generating hundreds, if not thousands, of data points during every visit to your platform, which can be compiled with other data from other enterprise systems such as finance, sales and marketing tools. Needless to say, manually organizing, consolidating and gleaning insights from all of this information is a gigantic challenge.
This is why the more powerful your product analytics solution is, the more questions you can get answered and the more insights you can harness and track over time as changes are made. This ability to monitor trends can help refine your roadmap and inform decisions that help your company to reach its larger strategic goals.
