TWG and Mixpanel NYC Breakfast

For all the time and energy companies spend on collecting customer analytics, few have made the investment in actually understanding them. This is especially true when it comes to product analytics. Unlike the marketing analytics most of us are familiar with – monthly unique visitors, clickthrough rates and the like, product analytics are designed to deliver insight into customer behavior – in other words how customers actually use the product. If that sounds like a complicated proposition, well, you’re right. And it’s the reason that product analytics companies like Mixpanel, Amplitude and Heap exist.

Last week Mixpanel‘s Director of Analytics Strategy Fatih Koca treated a New York audience to a practical session on product analytics along with TWG’s James Costa, who demonstrated how Mixpanel’s Measurement Framework was used to guide the development of a new product for TWG client Creatubbles.

The presentation focused on how to develop a product strategy that identifies key KPIs, how to identify the right metrics to measure those KPIs, and how to create those metrics based on user actions within your product. Segmenting KPIs based on user cohorts was another core concept. Similar activity generated by different cohorts – a new user vs a returning active user for example, may have significantly different motivations and expectations of the product.

After the presentation James and Fatih facilitated a breakout workgroup session that tasked smaller teams with developing their own product analytics strategy using the mixpanel framework.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” as the famous Peter Drucker quote goes. But Drucker likely never imagined measuring the complexity of interactions and human behaviors that make the difference between a delightful app or a dud. Fortunately product analytics – and people like James and Fatih – are here to help.