The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

Chapter 14 Use Analytics to Optimize Your Product and Business

Chapter 13 covers how to define and measure your key metrics, providing the foundation for using analytics to improve your product and business. The great thing about a live product is that analytics let you clearly see the results of changes that you make. With a good A/B testing framework, you can easily conduct experiments and make improvements rapidly. Companies that do this well have an advantage over their competitors. The size of your current business becomes less relevant; instead, how quickly you can learn from customers and iterate becomes the basis of competition. Speed is a weapon—in today's fast-paced world, David can unseat Goliath overnight. This chapter shows you how to harness the power of analytics to optimize your product and business.

THE LEAN PRODUCT ANALYTICS PROCESS

I've worked with many companies to define and implement their analytics framework, which I then used to optimize their product and business. Along the way, I developed a simple, repeatable process for how to use analytics to drive improvements—the Lean Product Analytics Process, illustrated in Figure 14.1.

The first step in the Lean Product Analytics process is to define the key metrics for your business, which I covered in the prior chapter. Next, you need to start measuring these metrics so you can establish a baseline value for each one so you know where you stand today. This step may sound relatively trivial, but a lot of companies ...