What key metrics do you look to move for more matured products?

Key success metrics for a mature product can vary depending on the specific industry, product, and business objectives. However, here are some common metrics that can be valuable indicators of success:

• Revenue and profitability: I often see Product Managers focus just on revenue. It’s important to also consider the cost to serve, which will give you insight into if the product is profitable and viable for the business. 

• Customer Retention and Churn Rate: This is critical for SaaS business but also to consider a product mature I’d expect to see very high retention rates / low churn rate. I’d also expect the Product Manager to understand what is driving churn. Some churn is unavoidable, for example a customer could go out of business. As a Product Manager you just want to make sure you know if your products churn is truly unavoidable.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS: Here I look to use surveys and feedback from your customers. If buyers are different from your users make sure you are checking in with the users. If you have different types of users (e.g. high frequency users and low frequency users) it can be important to track CSAT and NPS for these different user segments.

• Adoption and Usage Metrics: I think people can confuse mature with dying products. Mature products should still see adoption of enhancements and strong usage. Usage patterns may vary based on the industry and type of product so it will be important to understand the type of usage you expect your product to see and then measure that.

As with any metrics and measurement it’s important to make sure the metrics align to your business and product strategy. Be honest with yourself on what data you need and if that data can provide you insights. You don’t want to be data rich but insights poor.

Any product metric (for products at any stage) should ideally be tied to business goals and to user goals. So if the business goals are focussed on revenue growth, then making sure that product goals and outcomes, measured via metrics, are also contributing to those overall business goals.

That being said, the top product metrics that I believe are important to move forward for mature products are:

• increasing user retention

• reducing user/revenue churn

• removing user friction (in product engagement)

User friction related metrics are always important to keep an eye on as they can be an early indicator of churn and revenue loss.