 Hey everyone, I'm Ray. I'm the head of marketing over here at FreshPaint. And I'm joined today by Mapolo Basing who is a FreshPaint customer. Hey Mapolo, how's it going? Great, how are you? Doing good, man. Mapolo, would you mind just for the folks who are viewing? Can you just give us a quick intro and tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, my name is Mapolo. I'm director of product at Charlie Health. I've been in product management probably for eight or nine years now. Worked at several health tech companies and startups. And yeah, I love analytics. That's awesome. I mean, just for fun to make it personal, obviously you obsess over product marketing for work. You've been doing that for a while. What's something you obsess over when you're not working? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things right now. It's wrestling. I coach high school wrestling and we had a super exciting match last night. It ended up tie and there was a bunch of tie breaking criteria and we won on the ninth criteria. So it was a really exciting match and just a lot of working with the kids and seeing them grow as human beings. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about, you've been doing this for a while as a product manager. Can you just walk us through a little bit of how you got started? Yeah, so I actually used to be a civil engineer. I worked on hospitals and structures and I had a friend who worked at a startup as a project manager. He told me I'd be good at it and so I switched over and became a project manager. I did that for like three or four years. Really got my feet wet in the space like understanding how software is built, developed, learned a bunch of different things. I really felt like I could move into product management. So I convinced our team at Location Labs that I could be a product manager and so they gave me a shot at it. So one of the things I did was I was trying to figure out like how folks signed up for our product and we had a stream of sign up but we didn't really know where they were coming from and I thought like, well, the biggest impact I could make is just figuring out how people sign up and if I could drive a little improvement there that would be a huge win and people might notice. So essentially bribed one of our engineers who I was kind of managing another project on and I asked them to introduce a little snippet on our kind of sign up landing page to capture where folks were coming from. So this is like the URL that they were coming from. And so our product was a white label product with one of the major cell phone carriers. And so I ended up getting this massive list of like all these URLs from this carrier. And then I found through the product analytics that I think like 40 or 50% of our impressions on that webpage were coming from this one URL but compared to all the other URLs, its conversion was way, way less. It was like 5% and everyone else was like 30 or 40%. So I was like, huh, this is like really odd. So found that link and I saw on that page that we had like their page had a really strong value prop. Like, hey, this is what this is gonna solve. And then when you clicked on that link it just got dropped and you got asked to pay for the product and you didn't know what the product was. And so, yeah, I got a designer. We built like a very simple three screen carousel that they would hit before they were asked to pay. And that conversion went up higher than even like the other channels. And so because of the way all the math worked out I boosted signups for a product in like by 50% with just like, I don't know a few hours or a few days of development time. And so, yeah, it was a lot of work but without those analytics, I would have been nowhere. And so that kind of put me on that path to like find out that solution. And one thing that was fun after that it seemed like I got noticed within the product team our head of product actually made all the other PMs build out journeys for their product. So that was fun. But yeah, then I, they put me in charge of bigger and more important products after that. I love that story for two reasons. One, it's a great example of like without the analytics you wouldn't have known where to look for to find the problem. And without the analytics you wouldn't have been able to measure like if the like saliently it's a great thesis like let's just create a better experience or like if you're not able to measure the result you just wouldn't ever be able to tell that story. Yeah, the analytics in this case it was like it showed me where to look. And then I looked and then like, and then it comes like, okay, this isn't a good experience how do I make it a better experience? But like, the analytics paired with the user research paired with the design and understanding of your customers that's what kind of ties it all together. And then at the end of the day when you're done you can just show them a cool graph that says look what happened, it went up 50% and no one can argue with him. That's right. So after that you've gone on and continued this career in products. I think you've had, this is gonna be like Charlie's your fifth company now. When you start a new role like I think you've fairly recently moved over to Charlie, how do you approach that? What's your framework to approaching the new role? Yeah, so the first thing I do is try to orient myself around the customer user, the people that are using buying our product. And so what that typically looks like is all shadow if you have a sales team I'm shadowing sales calls just to see what their conversations are like. If you wanna know how your product works or how your customers perceive your product what a sales call. Cause the folks that are demoing are gonna be demoing the things that customers care about. And so I'd always start there. I'd also talk with customer success if your product has like an onboarding experience shadow those onboarding calls. And then the third thing is see what people are doing in your product. So I always lead on analytics. So I've done that. I've talked to customers. I've seen what they've been doing. I've seen sales. But then I also wanna kind of pair that and validate that with some analytics. So I try to pair like talking with customers with seeing how they actually use the product. Cause sometimes those things are not aligned. And there's a lot of interesting questions or things you wanna dive into there. Yeah, like in some ways the product analytics can just show you right away where the drop off is in the funnel and then session replays and customer interviews can help you understand like why are they dropping off there? What's happening there? And then you kind of have some ways to kind of de-rescue roadmap and prioritize going forward. Yeah. What advice, since you've been through this before what advice would you give to the PMs that are on this call? What advice would you give to them if they're struggling to get their management onboard? Yeah, so I've dealt with different ends of the spectrum on this like some places I've gone into have been like, hey, yeah, we need product analytics. And that's usually because someone up in leadership has had that in the past and seen the value of it. So it's not a hard conversation but there's definitely places, especially early stage or founders that maybe haven't had a ton of experience at other startups or other companies and they may not really understand the value of analytics or maybe they think what they have now is good enough. So my recommendation would be always start at the top and figure out what the leadership team cares about. So the one practical tip that I would give that's worked out really well for me is I just ask all the, like when I'm thinking about, hey, I need to roll out analytics. I ask all the leadership teams or all the stakeholders to write out all the questions they have about our customers. And it's very easy for them. It takes them five minutes. They come up with a huge laundry list of questions and then I'll just bucket them. There's usually like some very common themes that come up and I can say, okay, I'm gonna answer these questions with some product analytics and that's how I kind of pitch it to the team. And then that'll actually feed into when I start rolling out analytics across the organization. So almost like, because everyone will have like a set of really strong questions and basically you're saying if analytics isn't there, a lot of those questions are gonna be very difficult to answer for people. And so the next step for you to answer them, which there is an appetite to get those questions answered is let's get some baseline of analytics in place so I can come back to you with results. Yeah, and most small startups when they don't have that in place, it's like everyone has a different opinion about the answer to all those questions based on their own experience. And that's where like an unbiased data set can kind of guide folks or unify folks around what the actual answer to that question is. Is that how that conversation, like you're in the room with all the executives, maybe the founders of the startup, is that how that conversation goes? Like is it, everyone has their opinion to these questions and do you call out that like, we actually don't have a way to measure that quantitatively? So it'd be helpful for us to like pair those opinions with that actual result. Is that exactly how the conversation goes for you? Yeah, I mean, usually it comes in the form of like, you're talking about a roadmap or prioritization. And so it's like, hey, I'm trying to prioritize this project or initiative or at the company or this feature. And so you're weighing different features and then each team, sales is gonna have one take on this is the most important feature. Customer success is gonna be like, hey, this is causing the most tickets and da-da-da. And everyone, there's like that tension of like which thing do we weight the most? And having an unbiased analytics take that where you can use, you're still always gonna have that, but maybe you have this other party in the room that can help, you know, squelch some of the tension or unify folks around an idea or data. So yeah, that's how it usually forms. That's cool. Do you, I know the early success story of like juicing signups by 50%, is there another time that you can think of more recently where you weren't able to answer a question, but analytics actually helped you like answer it and it had a big impact? Like, can you think of any other time? Yeah, so if we were gonna start up, board meetings are always a thing. And so like every three months or six months, if you're like leading a product team or you'll just sometimes the CEO will just slack you and they'll just ask you random questions. And you don't really know the context, but you know it's for like a board meeting and they're gonna present it at this board meeting or something where they're trying to dive into or answer some question that some board member had. So yeah, there was one situation at Osmine where we were trying to figure out, we had this kind of feature that we had piloted and we were trying to figure out some information about engagement and we didn't really have it well tracked at the time. And so it either required like an engineer to go look in a database and write some queries and so the CEO asked me to investigate. I went in, I used fresh paint to just basically auto-track the button click and it's not gonna be a precise answer about exactly how many times someone interacted with the feature, but I could very easily show like, hey, this is like in the ballpark of how many times this how it's been growing month over month and choreograph and then you're off and running. So really quickly in that case, it's amazing because I don't need to talk to engineering, I don't need to go through a cycle of sprints to get something implemented. I could get an answer to her right away and have high confidence that that data is good. Well, yeah, I mean, that like our CEOs like whenever we can like they're on the spot sometimes trying to like answer a question, right? That's really what this is about and it can be reactive. What was the outcome there? Like how did that impact your relationship with the CEO being able to like get that answer that she needed? Yeah, so I think it builds trust, you know and so much in software is developing trust with your teams, executives, leadership. You know, ultimately, like as you're trying to grow in your career, one way to grow is be an asset for your manager, for your boss. If you can prove that you can deliver on things, they'll come back to you more and more. Yeah, I think there's often a perception that managers need to manage you but often it's on you to kind of manage up, know what they need, know what they want, provide that and that's what'll help grow you in your career and get promoted. Yeah, it's really credibility and trust are so key because you need that buy-in to get, you also need that buy-in to get the time you need to figure things out, right? A lot of this is trial and error and experimentation. I love that. You've built a couple of teams now on the product side. So you moved from like self-starter, product manager and now you're leading product teams. When you're thinking about scaling your team and building that team of PMs, how do you think about your team as it relates to analytics? Like what do you look for? What do you look for in your team? Yeah, so on the product side, I think there's so many, it's a very like broad skill set. I think that you need to be a successful product manager, you need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to communicate with design and understand design, understand funnels, understand the business and what's important and lifetime value, yada, yada, yada. And then, but on the analytics side, when you're in the day-to-day and the weeds of like trying to build a product, the things that I'm looking for in analytics is like, do you understand a funnel? Do you understand what retention is and why that's important for the business? Do you understand what drives retention? So when I'm doing an interview and I'm diving into a question, like I wanna hear folks talk about, oh yeah, we implemented this thing, we saw higher engagement and then ultimately that helped drive retention on our product. Or we made this change to improve this funnel and improve engagement in the product. And so I'm looking for that story of building something, of creating something, but also an analysis that comes with it and like capturing those success metrics and using that through analytics, yeah. For me, I've been doing startups for a long time and I feel like I'm constantly learning new things. I don't have all the answers and I don't even have a playbook, right? Just some frameworks and a bunch of tactics because it changes constantly. Yeah. I imagine like newer PMs, it's a fire hose. There's a lot to learn, right? So where do you direct your team to try to like continue their learning? Yeah, so for product analytics, it's been around for a while now and it's been a growing field. So there's like so much, there's so much content out there, so much great content out there. So the places that I usually direct people is, Mixpanel has a great retention playbook and it was one of the first things I read. It's long, but it's super detailed. And I think it covers like a ton of what you need to know in terms of analytics, you can really dive in. Beautiful illustrations, well-written, it's free. It just costs you your email address and marketing from amplitude. Sorry, it's amplitude, I should say. Amplitude, yeah. Amplitude, yeah, mastering retention. I also recently took, this is a plug for the old product school, they didn't pay me anything for this. I recently took their Mixpanel course and that was super useful for myself. I hadn't used Mixpanel for a while and I had got to learn and build out charts and learn about a bunch of new functionality that I didn't know about. So there's great tools out there, just Google them, but those are two that like, hey, if you want hands-on experience, check out that Mixpanel product school class. I think it's a, you can get a certificate. It takes a couple hours and then check out mastering retention by Amplitude. That's, those are awesome tips and nice plug for everyone here who's part of product school already, so it should be something they can access. I guess the last question we have is like specifically found, implementing analytics. I've actually spent the last couple of months having a hundred plus discovery calls with product leaders around like some of the challenges that they've had. And it's difficult to get like this buy-in, it's difficult to like prop up analytics, it's difficult to like get buy-in from engineering to create new events. Like what are some tips and tricks that you can share about that? Yeah, so I would always start small. I talked earlier about creating like, getting all the questions out there from all the stakeholders. And when you look at all those questions, you can probably answer them with a handful of events. I think actually Mixpanel and their onboarding, they basically ask you to implement, I think it's one or two events and then they build like this beautiful dashboard for you. And I think it's to get at this point of like, hey, you wanted with the smallest amount of work, you wanna show that this is something valuable. And so yeah, so like I would start really small, think about those questions and then plan out how you're gonna implement those few events in the minimum amount of time possible, share those out. So as soon as you get them, as soon as you start seeing those data, share them out. Like once I implement Mixpanel, I'm like, the next week is like marketing. I'm just like, here, look at this chart, look at this chart. I'm just getting everyone to see what's out there in the org and then it kind of feeds itself. People will ask questions and you'll be like, yeah, I can do that. Let me implement another event on there. And there's also, one thing that I love about FreshPaint is they have this auto-tracking feature and they also have this historical playback. So one of the things is once you can implement very cheaply and get a baseline of everything. And that was super valuable because instead of going on your team, be like, hey, we're gonna have to spend the sprint and implement a bunch of analytics. You can say, hey, I have a story and it can be done in like an hour, put it on there and then I can get some baseline. And so your upfront investment is small and you can get at least a baseline of analytics. You can very quickly get a lot of information that is valuable at no cost. Do you mind if I share a visual with everyone who's tuned in? Because I think this visual helps kind of illustrate a little bit about what you talked about. Yeah, sure. So let me share my screen here with everybody. So this is, could you talk to this a little bit? Mapolo, just for everyone who's, all the PMs out there who are watching this, basically like what Mapolo is saying is the conventional way of implementing event tracking. There's a process, like you have a process here and it takes time, conservatively a month, some will pay it at much longer than a month. Can you just talk through this visual, like what you see here? Yeah, so usually like you'll be doing some, you know, research or something and you're like, oh, I wonder how many people click on this button or like navigate to this page and then navigate to this page. So you'll then go and like write a doc and say, hey, I want to track this event and you define the event and you say what properties you want, you write up that ticket and then you put it in the backlog and try to get it prioritized in an upcoming sprint, right? And then engineer picks it up, they ask some questions or like, oh, it's hard to do this way, you go back and forth, you fill it in and then finally they implement the event, you wait for it to get released and then you wait for the data to populate and then you have your answer and it's like four, five, six weeks since you, you know, wanted that answer. And so you've lost all that time and you don't have an answer to your question. And so you'll just do that over and over again. And it's good to still do that over time but sometimes you just need an answer right away. What's the impact to you as a PM when you have to wait? Like, I mean, it's probably obvious but I just want to hear it in your own words. Like when you have to wait a month or more to get an answer to a question, like what's the end? Why do you care? Why do you want to move faster? Yeah, it means that like I'm working on a project and they either have to move forward with like less confidence, higher risks, less information or I say, hey, we're gonna hold and wait for this thing and then I find something out and I'm like, dang, I wish I did that four weeks ago, I would have like prioritized this higher. And so the impact is really just like in speed and speed and understanding. And if you don't have those things and in startup world that stuff matters and in a month your team could totally shift priorities and you've lost the opportunity to work on something that you might think is really important. Yeah, and I think it's probably worth just showing quickly for everyone here, like what you were talking about, that process that could take a month or more versus I just want to get the answer now. Like I want to run that analysis and mix panel right away. So Mopolo, I know you use FreshPain. We're running FreshPain, the product on FreshPain, our website. So I'm just gonna like illustrate to everybody here what that looks like. Yeah, and this is what you meant, right? Like maybe I'm building a funnel here and for us, we need to have conversations about how FreshPain works. So we have a sales led go to market strategy and getting a demo clicks is a super important one just as a point of illustration. So as Mopolo said, instead of submitting this ticket to engineering to code this button click into the code base we can just do it right now. So we'll just do, we'll just call it product school demo click. And I'm gonna limit it to the homepage. So we know that that action on that button click is related to the homepage. And then I'm just gonna save that event to FreshPain. And immediately there's no wait here. We can go into the library and search for that action that we just set up. And we even capture a screenshot here so you can see what that event means because sometimes people are like, what does this mean? What event is Mopolo tracking here? Mopolo is not sure. You can know because we capture the screenshot and highlight the button. And the example here is like, we've got a couple of these events we'll just repeat that process to add them. And we can actually then push that to mix panel with one click. And the second part as Mopolo highlighted is you wanna run the analysis today. You don't wanna wait another two weeks for data to populate. So you can immediately backfill that data. We hold up to about 12 months worth of previous data because we've been tracking this event in the background or you can just limit it to a period. And so now that event is going downstream to mix panel where Mopolo or other PMs could jump in and basically like build that funnel or build that insights report and get your answer today. So that's what you were talking about, right? Like the month journey and everyone just we just did that so you could just see what we're talking about. But that was minutes. Like if I have to set up maybe five or six events, okay, maybe it takes me a half an hour to plan it out, go in and configure it. But like that's an answer I'm getting today as opposed to a month. Yeah, I mean, this is a great example. I mean, funnels are always easy examples in my opinion but like you book a demo and if you wanna answer the question like hey, what percentage of people click book a demo and then actually submit their information to book a demo that's two events. You can quickly send that event. You can see how long it takes between those events. You can see what percentage of folks drop off, what percentage of don't, which was completed, what browsers are on all that. You can get that instantly in like 30 minutes. So it's like a, it's a huge win. And I love auto tracking for that reason, a quick, rough, dirty, like relatively reliable. You can make a decision based on that data. There's always gonna be a need for precision events. Like, you know, for example, let's say you sent out an appointment text confirmation, that event is maybe sent from the backend. You're gonna have to fire a precision event for that. It's not like a button click on your website. And if someone responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm confirmed for that appointment. That's another precision event that you'd fire from the backend. So it's a combination of the precision and auto tracking, but there's so many times where you just need an answer like now, and that's when auto tracking is so useful. Yeah, you beat me to the punch. I was gonna ask you the question around the elephant in the room is the misnomer with auto track is that, yeah, auto track is not helpful because it doesn't solve all those precision events. And both of us share the same worldview with like, yeah, that's the wrong way to look at it. Like no one's saying that auto track solves everything. That's why companies like FreshPaint take a hybrid approach where we can auto track so you can move quickly, but then we have the ability to set up those server side events. So you have the best of both worlds. And over time as your dataset matures, you may capture more events, precision track, but you're always gonna iterate. You're always gonna launch products. You're always gonna make changes. And that's where the benefit of auto track comes in because you can actually like get that feedback loop very, very quickly so you know exactly what's working. And maybe when something's working, then you wanna solidify the dataset around that and you have the flexibility there. Yeah, yeah, 100%. For so many of just the quick, simple product questions and answers, auto tracking is great. I think one things that a lot of PMs do or I think a lot of folks in general is they over index on the quality of the data or getting the exact answer. So most of your decisions like you're not necessarily gonna have like all the statistical significance or you don't need data that's like 100% accurate all the time. If you knew it was 90% accurate, you could make the same decision, right? So I often found that we over index, we spend 90% of our time trying to make that 10% of the data perfect when really, we can just make a decision on the 90%. And so yeah, auto tracking is something that allows you to do that. That's huge. Well, I've really enjoyed the combo. I really appreciate you investing some time. I think people, I learned a lot from you and I think everybody else here did as well. So thank you, Mapalo, always appreciate you. Yeah, thank you, Ray. Take care. Take care, bye.