 Hello everyone and welcome to today's product school webinar. And our topic is the holistic approach to measuring product success. And my name is Anastasia Żelobowa. As we delve into the relevant product management, I'd like to emphasize a critical importance of holistic measurement of success. It's no longer enough to rely solely on quantitative metrics or superficial indicators. True product success is a multifaceted entity encompassing not only numbers, but also user experience, feedback, team dynamics and more. So by adopting a holistic approach, we gain a richer, deeper understanding of our product's impact, ensuring that we truly capture the essence of what makes a product resonate with our users. A little bit about me. So I am working in product management for over nine years now. I am specializing in the realm of advertising technology. My journey has taken me through the nuances of content recommendations, the intricacies of search algorithms and the vast world of maps. While advertising often provides clear success metrics, I've come to appreciate that genuine product success is multifaceted and goes beyond just numbers. I was always more interested in the backend services that are powering the advertising systems. So that came with a lot of challenges on what success is and how to measure and how to present it to the team. So I am honest to speaking from my experience. Today, I am proud to be a part of the delivery hero family, a global force present in over 70 markets worldwide. And when we go and when we discover what our product does and what it means to different users in different countries, we learn a lot together on the importance of the holistic approach to measuring the product's success and making sure that we can capture the full essence of what makes a product truly stand out. So with our agenda today, we are going to start with answering maybe the question of what the product success is, and we will also touch a little bit on the limitations of the North Star metric. Then we will go into using a metaphor for product success as an iceberg where we can look into the visible metrics, the ones that are on the top, some of the very visible metrics and the deep metrics. After that, we'll switch gears and we will look at the users at the heart of the product success. And then we will end with looking into embracing adaptability and experimentation. So let's go in. What does product success look like? Well, for every product, it's different to start. But when I think about product success in general, the traditional indicators come to mind first. Financial performance, user adoption, or market share. However, I have realized that this narrow definition often overlooks the underlying elements that make up genuine, sustainable success. So let's look into the North Star. It's an amazing concept and it is a single metric that aims to align everyone's focus. While it offers clarity, I have found that solely relying on North Star can sometimes be misleading. It doesn't always capture the full scope of intricacies of what makes the product truly successful. The North Star comes with a risk of developing tunnel vision. If we focus only on one metric, we might miss other vital aspects. Some that are hiding in the dark, some of them are risks, some of them are opportunities. So instead, I like to use the product success iceberg metaphor. Most of the iceberg is hidden below the surface. And the same goes for the factors that determine product success. So with the iceberg, let's look from the top. On the surface, we often look at business metrics on the company level, things that I mentioned already. Revenue, profitability, market share. Then we also look a lot as product managers at users and product usage. How many active users do we have? How engaged they are in all possible ways that they can be engaged with our product. Then diving a bit deeper, but still close to the surface, we have customer satisfaction. It's not just about numbers, but understanding the depth of loyalty among users that customer satisfaction is our ticket to the long-term product success. Here, feedbacks become indispensable. I always ask myself and my team members, are we actively seeking and genuinely listening to our users' feedback? Both of those parts are equally tricky, but equally important. I believe the insights from feedback can signal future challenges or opportunities long before they could become evident. So as product people, we can use even customer support tickets for inspiration. Then in the depths, product health matters. So without asking questions like, is our product technically robust? Can it handle growth? Can it scale, especially in the big companies? You might find yourself in a situation when precious time is running out and the window of opportunity is closing because the product's health was neglected. This part is also a way to give the highlight for the engineering and the technical depth conversations that we're all having. Then operational metrics come to mind. They give the insight into the team's effectiveness. How often do we release? Do we meet our quality standards? Other side of it is thinking about the team dynamics and the way how cross-collaboration works. Some of the metrics that we set up can help us track the delays or blockers caused by dependencies between teams. That will help us to improve communication and solve alignment issues. Effective cross-team collaboration often needs to smoother product rollouts. And then on the very deep end, there are my two favorite parts. Starting with strategic alignment. It's pretty close to my heart. Asking myself a question. Does the product resonate with our company's broader vision is quite important? We get caught up with day-to-day work, with measuring things, with shipping things, with developing and discovering things. But does it align with the whole company, with where the company is going? Does it have any synergies with any other products that the company has? Those are very important questions to ask yourself and stop for a second. And then that leads also to the competitive analysis and future potential. The competitive landscape keeps on changing. So I always want to know where do we stand in the market landscape? Are we leading the market or are we following the market? That really can change the way how we look at our risks and opportunities. And lastly, the future potential. Simply as that. Is our product positioned to adapt and evolve? Does it have a future? Does it have a future that is going to make the business grow for us and our users happy? I firmly believe that these deeper metrics stabilize and define our product success, much like the submerged part of the iceberg. Now changing a bit into the putting the user first and thinking about user centricity in the product success. In the heart of every product I've engaged with, there is one consistent element, the user. Users are the hard bit driving business and the product success. Regardless of the kind of product I've dealt with, I have observed that its core is always about user behavior and user journey. So to me, understanding the user problem and the user goals isn't just a step in the process. It's the bad rock upon which everything else stands. Getting this right is the first step of setting meaningful metrics. So there are some tips that I will not get tired of repeating. And I believe that as product people, we all know them, but we have to remind ourselves to research and understand our users and their problems first. Dive deep into user behavior and pain points to shape product solutions that truly resonate. Don't imagine how users would behave or what they would do, involve them in the process. Actively engage users in the product development journey, leveraging their insights for a more tailored experience. Then this is probably hard, but try to get the feedback. Okay, maybe not from each iteration, but from the big ones, from the important ones. Delicit feedback to ensure continuous refinement and alignment with user needs. While doing this, practice empathy. Put yourself in your user's shoes. Understanding their emotions and experiences. To design more compassionate and effective solutions. Think where they are, how they feel, how they think when they use the product that you're working on. Then also a very important part to be reminded about is improving accessibility. Ensure that your product is usable and enjoyable to everyone, which is not a given. And then last but not least is analyze short and long term impact of your product on your user. Don't evaluate just immediate actions, but look at the prolonged effects of product changes and the way it affecting users, ensuring sustainable value that the product brings to the users and customer satisfaction. So let's think about couple of products that we all know as examples here. For example, first YouTube. So while views is a common metric, some of the deeper metrics like average watch time or engagement rate, such as likes, comments and shares, offer insights into user behavior and content resonance. This metrics guide content creators and advertisers alike and that on its own is driving the platform and is driving the conversation between the users, the viewers and the content creators that is happening on the global YouTube platform. Another example could be Uber. So for a platform like Uber, while daily active riders is an obvious metric, deeper metrics such as average wait time for a ride or rider and driver satisfaction scores become crucial. These metrics give Uber insights into operational efficiency and user satisfaction, ensuring that both drivers and riders have an optimal experience today, tomorrow and in the future. And now let's move further and talk a little bit about adaptability. The only constant is change. In my journey through the Techlandscape, I've learned that adaptability isn't just a buzzword. It's the compass by which we navigate product success. While traditional metrics offer valuable insights, true success often hinges in the ability to interpret, anticipate and evolve with these metrics in the face of change. At the heart of adaptability lies the essence of experimentation. It's through experimentation that we truly grasp our metrics, understanding their depth and implications. Metrics, after all, aren't just numbers. They are narratives of user behavior, market shifts and product potential. So that's why here on the left, you see the Lean Startup Build Measure Learn Loop, through which I guide myself to start with transforming ideas into experiments, then accessing outcomes and gathering feedback, then deriving insights and determining next steps. In this journey, metrics guide the experimentation, illuminating paths of opportunity and areas of improvement. So a dynamic approach to metrics helps us to anticipate change, pivot effectively and align with evolving user needs. In a nutshell, it's not just about hitting target numbers, but understanding the story that the metrics tell and preparing to the next chapters ahead. By interwinding metrics of adaptability, we ensure our products remain relevant, impactful and successful in a constantly changing environment. For example, pivots often come with a change in metrics that better suit the new direction of the product. Here are some of the examples of successful metric changes accompanying notable product pivots. The first one that comes to mind for me is the journey of Slack, which began as a gaming company with a game called Glitch. But here's where metrics played a pivotal role. The team noticed that the engagement metrics weren't quite stacking up for Glitch. Yet, amidst this, they had developed an internal communication tool to facilitate team interactions during the game development. The consistent and growing use of the tool internally was a bright spot. They recognized the potential of the tool, pivoted, and that's how Slack, as we know it, the collaboration platform has begun. Another example that also comes to mind would be Groupon. Initially, it started as the point, a platform aiming to bring people together for social activity. Good cause, however, the user metrics showed that the traction wasn't there. It was a challenging phase, but amidst this, they noticed the spark. A side feature that brought people together for collective purchasing began to show impressive metrics in terms of user adoption and conversion rates. Identifying the opportunity, they pivoted. And this is how Groupon was born. So to recap our today's webinar key takeaways. First and foremost, understand the holistic success indicators for your product. It's important not to only look at the numeric data, but also incorporate feedback, customer satisfaction, and team dynamics as a part of your success metrics. Then always put the user front and center. Empathy and customer-centric thinking are important for a successful product leader who needs to understand the customer journey and how measuring success isn't just about product sales or usage statistics, but also about the short-term and long-term impact on the user, ensuring the future success of the product. And last but not least, nothing is stable. The only constant is change. Adaptability in modern product leadership is important. Product organizations have to adapt to changing market conditions, customer needs, business priorities, and product leaders' success can be measured by their adaptability to pivot and make informed decisions quickly. On this note, I would like to thank you and I truly hope that this today's webinar can start some line of thought or bring something to the table for product managers and their product teams and the product leaders to look at the success in a more holistic way, to think about incorporating different points of view and different metrics in order to be able not only focused on the spotlight and on the north star of your product, but also to see what's in the dark. What are the risks and what are the opportunities that can come very handy for the future success of the product that you are working on today? Thank you. Hope to see you on our next webinars and goodbye.