title: Lean Analytics date: 2020-09-9 11:26:09 top: false cover: false password: toc: true mathjax: false tags:
- Product_Notes categories:
- Product
Chapter1 We are All Liars
Concierge MVP
The Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing you can build that will create the value you’ve promised to your market.
Chapter2 How to Keep Score
What Makes a Good Metric?
- A good metric is comparative
- A good metric is understandable
- A good metric is a ratio or a rate
- A good metric changes the way you behave
Metrics often come in pairs:
Conversion rate(the percentage of people who buy something) and Time-to-purchase((how long it takes someone to buy something)： Together, they tell you a lot about your cash flow.
Viral cycle time (how long it takes them to invite others) drive your adoption rate
Industries and KPIs:
restaurant owner : the number of covers (tables) in a night;
investor: the return on an investment
media website: ad clicks
Qualitative versus quantitative metrics
Quantitative data is easy to understand
Qualitative data is messy, subjective, and imprecise.
If quantitative data answers “what” and “how much,” qualitative data answers “why.”
Vanity versus actionable metrics
vanity metrics:
total signups:
The number can only increase over time (a classic “up and to the right” graph). It tells us nothing about what those users are doing or whether they’re valuable to us. They may have signed up for the application and vanished forever.
total active users
Assuming that you’ve done a decent job of defining an active user—but it’s still a vanity metric. It will gradually increase over time, too, unless you do something horribly wrong
actionable metrics:
percent of users who are active
it tells us about the level of engagement your users have with your product. When you change something about the product, this metric should change, and if you change it in a good way, it should go up. That means you can experiment, learn, and iterate with it.
number of users acquired over a specific time period
This will help you compare different marketing, Segmenting experiments by time.
Eight Vanity Metrics to Watch Out For
- Number of hits. If you have a site with many objects on it, this will be a big number. Count people instead.
- Number of page views.it counts the number of times someone requests a page. Unless your business model depends on page views (i.e., display advertising inventory), you should count people instead.
- Number of visits. Is this one person who visits a hundred times, or are a hundred people visiting once? Fail.
- Number of unique visitors. All this shows you is how many people saw your home page. It tells you nothing about what they did, why they stuck around, or if they left.
- Number of followers/friends/likes. Counting followers and friends is nothing more than a popularity contest, unless you can get them to do something useful for you. Once you know how many followers will do your bidding when asked, you’ve got something.
- Time on site/number of pages. These are a poor substitute for actual engagement or activity unless your business is tied to this behavior. If customers spend a lot of time on your support or complaints pages, that’s probably a bad thing.
- Emails collected*. A big mailing list of people excited about your new startup is nice, but until you know how many will open your emails (and act on what’s inside them), this isn’t useful. Send test emails to some of your registered subscribers and see if they’ll do what you tell them.
- Number of downloads. While it sometimes affects your ranking in app stores, downloads alone don’t lead to real value. Measure activations, account creations, or something else.
Exploratory versus reporting metrics
Leading versus lagging metrics
Lagging metric churn (which is the number of customers who leave in a given time period) gives you an indication that there’s a problem—but by the time you’re able to collect the data and identify the problem.
In the early days of your startup, you won’t have enough data to know how a current metric relates to one down the road, so measure lagging metrics at first. Lagging metrics can provide a solid baseline of performance. For leading indicators to work, you need to be able to do cohort analysis and compare groups of customers over periods of time.
The volume of customer complaints.
the number of support calls that happen in a day
the number of customer complaints in a 90-day period
Both could be leading indicators of churn: if complaints are increasing, it’s likely that more customers will stop using your product or service. As a leading indicator, customer complaints also give you ammunition to dig into what’s going on, figure out why customers are complaining more, and address those issues
Account cancellation or product returns
In an enterprise software company, quarterly new product bookings are a lagging metric of sales success. new qualified leads are a leading indicator, because they let you predict sales success ahead of time. But in addition to qualified leads you need a good understanding of conversion rate and sales-cycle length. Only then can you make a realistic estimate of how much new business you’ll book.
Correlated versus causal metrics
Moving Targets
Cohort: comparison of similar groups along a timeline.
Segmentation: cross-sectional comparison of all people divided by some attribute(age, gender, etc)
A/B test: changing one thing and measuring the result(e.g. revenue)
multivariate analysis: changing several things at once to see which correlates with a result.
Chapter3 Deciding what to do with your life
The Lean Canvas:
Problem: Have you identified real problems people know they have?
Customer segments: Do you know your target markets? Do you know how to target messages to them as distinct groups?
Unique value proposition: Have you found a clear, distinctive, memorable way to explain why you’re better or different?
Solution: Can you solve the problems in the right way?
Channels: How will you get your product or service to your customers, and their money back to you?
Revenue streams: Where will the money come from? Will it be onetime or recurring? The result of a direct transaction (e.g., buying a meal) or something indirect (magazine subscriptions)?
Cost structure: What are the direct, variable, and indirect costs you’ll have to pay for when you run the business?
Metrics: Do you know what numbers to track to understand if you’re making progress?
Unfair advantage: What is the “force multiplier” that will make your efforts have greater impact than your competitors?
Chapter3 Data Driven vs Data informed
