Metrics, data & experimentation

Why You Aren’t Learning As Much As You Could From Your Experiments

Teresa Torres argues that teams use A/B tests poorly, mainly to confirm favored ideas or to blindly try variations, which teaches them little. Drawing on John Dewey's account of reflective thinking, she describes a…

What to Do When You Don't Have Enough Traffic To A/B Test

Teresa Torres argues that a lack of web traffic should not stop product teams from learning, even if A/B testing is their only experimentation tool. Using a worked example of testing testimonials on a blog's about page…

Measuring Innovation

Marty Cagan argues that popular product measurement tools, such as product scorecards and Eric Ries's 'innovation accounting', are valuable for focusing on outcomes but are insufficient on their own. Measuring only…

Measuring Product Managers

Marty Cagan argues that the true measure of a product manager is the success of their product, but that picking the right success metric is hard. He proposes the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely…

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…

The Ethics of the Data We Collect

Teresa Torres argues that product builders rarely stop to consider the ethics of the data they collect, even though user tracking has grown far beyond the cookies that alarmed people in the late 1990s. She notes that…

Predicting The Impact Of Each User Story

Teresa Torres argues that predicting the expected impact of each user story before building it serves two purposes: it helps prioritize the backlog, and it surfaces the hidden assumptions behind what a team is building…

How to determine your activation metric

A follow-up on activation metrics explaining a three-step method: brainstorm candidate moments from usage data, test them with regression against retention, then run experiments to confirm causality. It adds real reader…

Measuring The Success Of Product Emails

This post sets out what product teams should realistically expect from email metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribes. It explains that open rates are an imperfect approximation…

Net Promoter Score, The Ecstasy of Business Metrics?

Hiten Shah responds to critics who call Net Promoter Score (NPS) harmful or overrated, arguing the metric is not the problem but how it is used. He contends NPS is useful only as one input among many feedback methods…

Why great AI products are all about the data

Introducing Core 4: The best way to measure and improve your product velocity

Lenny Rachitsky introduces Core 4, a unified developer productivity framework built with DX and the authors of DORA, SPACE, and DevEx. The post explains how to baseline team velocity with an anonymous survey, calculate…

What is a good activation rate

Lenny Rachitsky and growth advisor Yuriy Timen ran a benchmarking survey of over 500 product teams to answer what counts as a good activation rate. The article defines activation as the share of new users who reach a…

The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track (and how to best visualize them)

Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about which metrics early-stage bottom-up SaaS founders should track beyond MRR, which tools they use, and how they visualize results. He draws on crowdsourced input and…

Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better

Find Big Wins by Setting Exponential Goals

Teresa Torres argues that teams who set incremental goals get incremental results, and that big wins require exponential goals. She recommends focusing on a single metric chosen for its impact on the business…

Why Product Leaders Need Product Operations

Cheryl Michael, CPO of CentralReach, argues that product leaders who want to act with confidence need a structured, data-driven approach to product operations rather than relying on intuition alone. She frames product…

Setting Product Goals

Teresa Torres walks through how she sets quarterly product goals for her team, focusing on the most valuable thing the business needs next. She shows three quarters of goals that changed as her understanding grew: first…

Leveraging Data Science

Cagan argues that many product companies have yet to seriously consider data science, even though leading firms are already gaining advantages from it. He distinguishes data science from traditional analytics by its…

How to increase your product's retention

Lenny explains how to measure retention using cohort charts, and why a curve that flattens signals product-market fit. He then lays out seven levers for improving retention, ranked by expected impact: improving the…

Fifty-five Percent of Companies Use this One Method to Measure Customer Happiness

Hiten Shah surveyed practitioners about how they measure customer happiness and found that 55% rely on Net Promoter Score, a single-question metric in use since 2003. The article reports other methods, including…

Product Discovery vs. Product Optimization

Cagan argues that product teams need two distinct disciplines: Product Discovery, which uses prototyping and user testing to find new valuable, usable, feasible solutions, and Product Optimization, which improves an…

Read Decisive and Make Better Product Decisions

Teresa Torres wraps a 3-month blog series inspired by Chip and Dan Heath's book Decisive, connecting its decision-making research to product work. Her posts argue that product teams should be prepared to be wrong, ask…