What is the role of the product marketer when it comes to monitoring product analytics? What metrics to monitor? How do we differentiate the metrics a product marketer has to monitor from those that the PM owns?

Question

Matt Hodges · Accepted Answer

Role depends on what other people/teams you have around to support you and metrics to monitor will depend on your GTM motion and business goals. Without getting specific, PMMs should care about the full funnel–from top to bottom. When you have a deep understanding of your funnel you can connect the dots where other can't and identify opportunities to improve, which may not be obvious in isolation. I think PMM should at the very least own traffic and signup metrics, but there should be shared accountability with product on goal attainment.

For example, at Atlassian I'm currently working on a new product (Atlas, check it out) and we run a process called the "Business Review" (monthly for now) led by our Strategic Business Operations (SBO) team with contributions from PM and PMM. In the review we report on our progress towards our goal (Active Instances) and the performance of the key mterics throughout the funnel that have a direct impact on our goal attainment. These include:

- Traffic

- Signups

- User/Instance Activation

- Time to Activation

- MAU

- Revenue

My role as a PMM is to partner with our analytics and product stakeholders to provide context and help construct a narrative on why specific metrics are up/down, with a specific focus on traffic and signups, which are both within more of my direct control and typically the metrics my activities are likely to impact the most.

Elizabeth Grossenbacher · Answer

This will depend on how your organization defines the PMM vs PM role. While I’ve never seen PMM “owning” product-specific analytics, I’ve also never seen PMM function without utilizing these metrics for analysis.

Whoever “owns” these metrics will vary by organization. I would start by having a frank conversation about what datapoints the PMM can easily gather, and which ones you need to complete your analysis. Just because you need a datapoint doesn’t mean you “own” its gathering. In our business unit at Twilio, our operations team gathers usage data and makes reports available to many other teams. I use that data to inform my strategies and quarterly customer insights analysis. As another example, PMMs don’t monitor customer support metrics, but I’ve found that sifting through these on a regular basis can provide some insightful insights on how customers are using your products and where your weak points are (bonus tip: think about reverse competitive analysis with this info).

Most PM teams are monitoring their own usage metrics. It’s worth your time as a PMM to look through those metrics on a regular basis and see who they fit into your market or customer analysis.

Sahil Sethi · Answer

In my experience, PMs are the ones in charge of monitoring product analytics and metrics around feature adoption, usage, MAU/DAU/WAU, bugs, time spent in product etc. Tools like Amplitude, Pendo, Mixpanel etc. make this really easy

Having said that, I strongly encourae PMMs to also monitor product analytics, even if it is not asked of them. Strong PMMs, especially those who own messaging/value prop/sales plays etc. for a certain product/feature/suite of features should have a deep, intuitive understanding of the product, use cases, usage patterns etc. At minimum, they should know their active user counts and its trends over time and key adoption/usage metrics for newly released features (e.g. what % of user base is using a feature 30/60/90/180 days post launch). PMMs should ask for access to product analytics tools, bookmark key dashboards and sit through product usage reviews with PMs. All of this will make them a better product marketer

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