Product in Practice: Iterating to an Actionable Outcome at tails.com

Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide daily work. They tried 30-day and then five-day retention, filtered to a stable signup channel, but each still proved slow, unreliable, or distorted, especially after COVID-19 changed customer behavior. The team finally shifted to two opportunity areas found through continuous discovery: customer perception of the food's fit and whether dogs actually enjoy it. Their story shows that defining outcomes is an iterative process that is simple in concept but hard in practice.

01Key takeaways

• Business outcomes like revenue or retention are lagging and influenced by many factors outside the product team's control.
• Choose a measurement window short enough to get timely test results, but check that the shorter metric actually correlates with the long-term goal.
• Filtering noisy data by a stable segment can make results more reliable and easier to act on.
• Turn vague customer concepts, like perception, into quantifiable metrics that the team can directly influence.
• Bringing engineers into discovery helps the whole team understand customer needs and build better solutions.
• Treat outcome definition as a continuous improvement loop, adjusting as new data and external factors emerge.

02Key sections

Why the 90-day North Star wasn't enough

The team agreed on 90-day retention as the business goal, which gave autonomy but was too lagging and affected by factors like signup channel to steer weekly work.

Shortening the measurement window

Moving to 30-day and then five-day retention sped up A/B test cycles, but the shorter metrics proved unreliable and could reverse over time.

Reducing noise and the COVID-19 disruption

Filtering to one stable signup channel reduced noise, but lockdown and a promo change shifted customer behavior, forcing the team to reset their baseline.

Finding a metric tied to the team's span of control

Using discovery insights, the team created a quality-of-experience survey metric and an interactive dog-enjoyment signal, each mapped to a specific early-journey problem.

Lessons on continuous discovery and patience

Involving engineers in discovery and talking to customers weekly built confidence, while humility and patience were needed to learn what moves a metric in a new problem space.

03From the post

“Hello Product Talk readers, we’re excited to share the latest Product in Practice with you! For this story, we caught up with Sonja Martin, Product Manager at tails.com. Sonja shares how her cross-functional team has changed their approach to defining their desired outcome over time. Want to”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.