Whether you’re a new UX designer or a product manager who works with data, it helps to understand the scope of what you’re able to do with the impressive amount of data you can collect. You can push your product and UX team to really dig deep into the data, and use it in a way that maximizes the usefulness of your product and the satisfaction of your customers.
In the beginning, you might be asking yourself the following questions: There is so much data I could collect: where should I start? How should I be thinking about data in SaaS product solutions? Do I track every click and API call in this application? How do I make connections with other systems or products in your application? How do clicks relate to revenue?
You can be relieved to know that you don't need to know all of this upfront to start your data journey.
What many UX designers and product managers don’t think about in the beginning is this: before you begin collecting data, you should focus on the goals that you will have down the pipeline.
Therefore, what you need to know are the five areas where data exists.
Four of these five areas align with the Product-Lead Marketing (or PLM, a business strategy which centers the product itself in the all marketing and customer experience) philosophy: Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew. Many companies espouse this philosophy for their products, and I encourage it. In my experience, we need one more: Improve. Let me go over these in a bit more detail.
Land is data that comes from your customer discovering, considering and deciding on your product. This is data from your marketing website, social media, distributors or etc. anywhere your customers see and learn about your product and brand before purchasing and using your product.
Adopt is data that comes from the single or group of actions taken on a feature by customers during the use of your products.
Once your users arrive in your product, they’re now interacting with different aspects and features. Maybe they’re logging into an account, visiting a page, swiping left, uploading photos, analyzing charts and/or any feature you product has. Whatever tasks they take inside your product falls under “Adopt.”
Improve is data that comes from the journeys that users take in your product.
With “Improve” data, we’re beginning to tell the story of the paths customers take when they use your product. Since “Adopt” encompasses the actions your users take, the sequence of actions can be called a journey.
You might have data that understands, “this user has been here three times, therefore we will now offer something new or different.” or “This user has been here three times and has never taken the next step.” This will help you know when you need to conduct more in-depth research on your users. You may have five (or 100) main journeys that users take through the product, depending on their demographics, or other data points. Ultimately, these are the paths (aggregate, intentional actions) that your users take.
Expand is adoption data segmented to assist you with upselling and/or cross selling to your customer.
Within your product, you would segment your customers , this could be by skill level: novice to competent, or by industry, demographics, product subscription levels etc.
This encompasses data about your company or product revenue to create segment levels within your product. E.g.: is your revenue for level x of segment y what you expect?
In Summary:
That’s it- those are the five areas. However, all data from the above areas can not be possible without starting with Adoption data. Your adoption features should be the center of your data sphere. All other areas depend on this data, therefore, always start there. Once you’re clear on what your product is asking users to do, you can branch out to the other goals to support your team’s needs.
What step are you on for Product Lead Marketing data collection? Let me know below, I’d love to hear about your journey.