If you think about it, products grow up much like people do. When they are new, everything is experimental and full of possibility. In the teenage phase, they can reinvent themselves every five minutes and get away with it. Eventually they reach adulthood and become more stable and predictable. And later in life, they need more careful attention and realistic expectations.

The point is that products change, the market changes, and your approach needs to change with them. Product managers who treat a decade-old product like a brand-new one end up with chaos. Product managers who treat a brand-new product like a mature one end up with tumbleweeds.

Product Life Cycle Management gives you the framework to avoid both mistakes. And below, we unpack exactly how each stage works and how you can adapt your strategy for it.

Why Product Life Cycle Management matters

Product Life Cycle Management matters because treating every product the same way, no matter how old it is, is how teams burn time, money, and energy without realizing it. The work your product needs when it’s brand new is nothing like the work it needs when it’s ten years old, but plenty of teams act as if every stage deserves the same playbook.

PLM helps you stop doing that. It gives you a clear picture of where your product actually is so you can make decisions that match reality, not assumptions or wishful thinking.

With a solid PLM approach, you can:

• Focus your effort where it makes the biggest impact
• See clearly when the product is growing, plateauing, or declining
• Decide when to invest, when to optimize, and when to sunset
• Catch risks while they’re still cheap and simple to fix
• Give marketing, sales, and leadership a shared understanding of what’s happening
• Avoid stuffing your roadmap with ideas that no longer make sense

Without PLM, everything feels reactive. You’re always scrambling. You’re fighting today’s problems with last year’s tactics, or trying to scale something that hasn’t earned it yet. With PLM, you have a straightforward framework that helps you prioritize what matters and guide the product into its next stage instead of letting the market do the steering for you.

A quick history of Product Life Cycle Management

The idea behind Product Life Cycle Management has been around longer than most modern product teams. The earliest version dates back to 1931, when Otto Kleppner outlined how products move through predictable phases. In the 1950s, consulting firms like Booz, Allen and Hamilton refined those phases into the lifecycle model everyone still recognizes today: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

The most famous early example of PLM in the wild comes from the 1980s automotive world. AMC used emerging CAD tools to manage the Jeep Cherokee through its later stages while designing its successor, the Grand Cherokee. They used everything they learned from the mature product to speed up development of the new one. Chrysler eventually bought AMC and rolled PLM out across the company.

The origins might be industrial, but the lesson still hits home for SaaS: you can’t treat every product the same way.

A mature product can teach you how to build something new. A declining product can show you where the market is heading next. And an early product can tell you what customers actually care about today, not three years ago.

If you want to get a sense of the roots of this thinking, Harvard Business Review has an article from 1965 (!) on how to exploit the product life cycle.

What are the stages of product lifecycle management?

Most products move through four predictable stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. The specifics look different from company to company, but the underlying patterns are the same. Each stage comes with its own risks, its own opportunities, and its own version of “you really shouldn’t be doing that right now.”

Let’s break them down.

1. Introduction phase

This is the newborn stage. Your product is out in the wild for the first time, and customers are poking at it to see if it actually does what you say it does. You’re learning just as much as they are.

What matters now:

• Validating that the problem is real
• Watching how early adopters actually behave
• Tightening your value proposition
• Keeping your roadmap flexible
• Shipping improvements quickly and openly

This stage is all about discovery. You’re not scaling yet. You’re proving the product deserves a future. If you ignore the signals here, you end up scaling something that doesn’t work. And that is a very expensive mistake to unwind.

2. Growth phase

Growth is the messy teenage phase. The product is gaining users, the market is paying attention, and demand can spike before the product is truly ready for it. Early adopters are replaced by mainstream customers who expect things to “just work”, and the bar for quality goes up fast.

What matters now:

• Improving reliability and stability
• Polishing rough edges in the UX
• Strengthening onboarding and activation
• Understanding why customers picked you
• Staying ahead of competitors who are suddenly very interested in you

Your goal in growth is simple: evolve the product fast enough that it appeals to a broader audience without losing the thing that made it compelling in the first place. This is where you really “cross the chasm,” and plenty of products don’t make it.

3. Maturity phase

Maturity is the comfortable middle age of the product lifecycle. You have predictable revenue, strong brand recognition, and a large customer base that relies on you every day. This is also the point where teams can get complacent. Competitors pile in. Customers raise their expectations. Technical debt creeps out from the shadows.

What matters now:

• Defending your position in the market
• Reducing friction in core workflows
• Improving reliability and performance
• Innovating without destabilizing your foundation
• Managing technical debt before it turns into a sinkhole

This is usually the most profitable stage, but also the easiest place to accidentally drift into decline. You need a deliberate strategy to keep the product relevant without overwhelming your existing customers.

4. Decline phase

Every product eventually hits a point where growth slows and the market moves on. New technologies emerge. Competitors absorb your core functionality. Maintenance becomes more expensive, and customers start migrating to other options.

What matters now:

• Deciding whether to reinvest, reposition, or retire
• Avoiding unnecessary feature bloat that drags the product down
• Simplifying the offering if needed
• Creating the path to whatever comes next
• Moving customers thoughtfully and transparently

Decline isn’t a failure. It’s a signal. The smartest companies recognize it early and use it to redirect energy into the next product that will carry the business forward.

How to manage each stage of the product lifecycle

Knowing the stages is helpful, but it’s not enough. The real value of Product Life Cycle Management comes from adjusting your approach as your product evolves. Each stage asks something very different from you, and ignoring those shifts is how teams waste months chasing the wrong problems.

Let’s look at what effective management actually looks like.

How to manage the introduction stage

The introduction stage is your reality check. You might have a strong hypothesis about the problem you’re solving, but this is the first time the market gets to weigh in. Your job now is to learn quickly and stay brutally honest.

What to do:

• Watch real user behavior, not what you hoped they would do
• Validate the problem and the value proposition
• Run small, fast experiments to test assumptions
• Ask good questions and listen carefully
• Keep the product simple so users can show you what matters
• Be willing to pivot or kill ideas that aren’t landing

Most teams get in trouble here by assuming early enthusiasm equals long-term demand. It doesn’t. You’re still figuring out whether this thing can support a business, not trying to scale it to the moon.

How to manage the growth stage

Growth is the balancing act. You’re gaining traction, but you’re also attracting scrutiny. Early adopters are forgiving. The mainstream isn’t. This stage is about evolving the product quickly enough to serve a broader audience without losing your identity in the process.

What to do:

• Improve stability and performance as usage increases
• Smooth out the user experience
• Strengthen onboarding and activation paths
• Study your early adopters to understand what drew them to you
• Identify the gaps that prevent mainstream adoption
• Keep an eye on competitors who suddenly think your idea is brilliant

The biggest trap here is feature frenzy. Teams want to add everything the market asks for. Resist that. Growth is about sharpening, not bloating.

How to manage the maturity stage

The maturity stage is where your product makes the most money and carries the most risk. You’re established, but so is your competition. Your customers rely on you. And technical debt is no longer theoretical; it’s a very real drag on your ability to move.

What to do:

• Invest in performance, quality, and reliability
• Remove friction from key workflows
• Modernize the product experience in thoughtful, incremental ways
• Explore expansion opportunities without destabilizing your core
• Address technical debt proactively before it turns into a brick wall
• Watch for early signs of decline such as shrinking engagement or rising churn

The maturity stage rewards teams that stay curious and disciplined. If you coast, the market will overtake you. If you panic and reinvent everything, your customers will revolt. The sweet spot is intentional, well-paced evolution.

If your product is in the maturity stage, keep an eye out for extension opportunities. A well-timed reinvention can reset the curve and give the product a second life before decline sets in.

How to manage the decline stage

Decline happens to every product if it sticks around long enough. The trick is recognizing it early and treating it as a strategic moment rather than a funeral.

What to do:

• Decide whether to reinvest, reposition, or retire
• Avoid piling on more features in a desperate attempt to “save” the product
• Simplify where possible to reduce maintenance cost
• Identify the new problems your customers are bumping into
• Design the transition to your next product long before you sunset the old one
• Communicate clearly and give customers time to adapt

A declining product isn’t a dead end. It’s a signal that something new needs your attention. The companies that handle decline well tend to be the ones that launch the next great thing.

Roadmapping across the product lifecycle

A roadmap only works if it reflects where your product actually is in its lifecycle. Treat an early-stage product like a mature one and you’ll smother it. Treat a mature product like it’s still in discovery and you’ll confuse your customers and burn your team out.

The roadmap needs to evolve just as the product evolves.

In the introduction stage, your roadmap should stay loose. You’re learning, not scaling. You’re testing ideas, watching how customers behave, and adjusting quickly when you learn something new. A rigid, date-driven roadmap here only boxes you in before you understand what customers really want.

Once the product enters growth, the roadmap needs more shape. You’re serving a broader audience now, and the rough edges matter. Onboarding, stability, and quality become just as important as new capabilities. You still need flexibility, but you also need clarity about which improvements unlock the next level of adoption.

By the time you reach maturity, the roadmap becomes more strategic. You’re keeping the product competitive while making sure the core experience stays reliable. Innovation still matters, but so does protecting what your customers count on every day. This is where roadmapping becomes a balancing act: evolve with intention, not shock value.

And in decline, the roadmap’s job shifts again. Adding more features won’t reverse the trend. Instead, the roadmap becomes a tool for simplifying, stabilizing, and planning the transition to whatever comes next. It’s about helping the product exit gracefully while creating space for the next opportunity.

This is exactly why Now-Next-Later roadmapping works so well across the entire lifecycle. It gives you structure without locking you into commitments that no longer fit. Whether you’re experimenting, scaling, optimizing, or winding down, NNL keeps the focus on priorities, outcomes, and evidence instead of arbitrary timelines.

And this is where ProdPad shines. Because your ideas, feedback, and objectives all sit in one place, the roadmap naturally shifts as the product shifts. The signals you see in introduction look nothing like the signals in maturity, and ProdPad surfaces those differences so you can make decisions that match where the product is right now, not where it used to be.

The end result is a roadmap that stays honest, adaptable, and aligned with the lifecycle instead of fighting against it.

The post Product Life Cycle Management – The 4 Stages and How to Manage Them appeared first on ProdPad.

Whether you’re using painted door tests for testing bold bets or just cleaning out the backlog, this tactic helps you separate gold from glitter. Here’s everything you need to know to run painted door tests like a pro (and skip the build trap entirely).

What is a painted door test?

A painted door test is a low-effort, high-signal experiment to gauge user interest in a feature or product that doesn’t actually exist yet. You slap a “fake” entry point – like a CTA button, email link, or landing page – into the wild. If people click, they’re knocking on the door. If they ignore it, you’ve just dodged a costly build. No dev time wasted. Just clean, fast validation.

Painted door tests let you sniff out demand before committing serious resources. They’re a clever way to answer: “Do people even want this thing?”

Painted door test vs. fake door testing: What’s the difference?

They sound like the same thing, and sure, they both involve a little light UX deception for a good cause. But painted door tests and fake door tests aren’t quite identical. 

They differ in where they’re deployed, how intrusive they are, and what kind of signal you’re hoping to capture. Understanding the nuance can help you choose the right one for your goal – whether it’s quick demand validation or a more embedded product experiment. Think of them as close cousins, not clones.

Painted door tests

These live outside your product – think marketing emails, website banners, or landing pages. You’re painting the door on a surface that’s quick to change and doesn’t touch product code. It’s fast, cheap, and risk-free.

Fake door tests

These happen inside your product – like a new menu item or toggle that doesn’t actually work (yet). Click it and users get a “Coming Soon!” or “Tell us what you think” message. More immersive, but needs closer coordination with Design and Engineering.

When to use which

A painted door test is best for early-stage, pre-dev experiments. 

Fake door testing is better for validating UI-integrated features later down the line.

Why would you use a painted door test?

Building the wrong thing isn’t just a time suck – it’s a morale killer, a roadmap derailer, and an all-too-common fate for teams chasing the wrong signals. How many hours have been lost to features that no one used, that stakeholders swore would be “game changers” but flopped the moment they went live? That’s where painted door tests come in. 

A painted door test is your early warning system – your way to sense-check whether an idea is worth anything before it eats into sprint cycles or burns out your Dev Team. With a simple setup, you can sniff out interest (or lack thereof) and use the results to steer clear of costly missteps.

Here’s where painted doors shine:

Validate demand without guessing

Skip the guesswork. Real clicks from real users, giving you real data.

Save engineering time

You don’t need to touch code to learn whether an idea has legs. Email + landing page = done.

De-risk big bets

Thinking of going big with a pricey new feature? A painted door test helps you learn if it’s worth the spend – or if it’s just a shiny distraction.

Prioritize with evidence

Data from a painted door test helps you sort the wheat from the backlog chaff. No more gut-instinct gambling.

Add qualitative insights

Ask a follow-up question as part of your painted door test like, “What were you expecting to see?” and boom – you’ve got context to match the clicks.

Bottom line: Painted door tests are the Product Manager’s secret weapon for fast, cheap, useful learning.

Who should run a painted door test?

This isn’t a solo mission. Painted door tests might look simple on the surface, but the best ones are backed by tight collaboration across the team. 

A well-run painted door test needs compelling messaging, convincing visuals, smart tracking, and a plan for what to do with the data once it starts rolling in. That means different perspectives, skills, and priorities coming together to make the illusion work – and the insights count. 

When you treat your painted door test as a cross-functional mini-project rather than a quick hack, you’ll get better outcomes and stronger alignment on what to build next.

Here’s how roles break down:

Product Managers

PMs usually lead the process – defining the experiment, setting success criteria, and making decisions based on the results. You’re the ones who have the product idea to test after all. 

Marketers

Because painted door tests are often run on marketing websites, via email, or through CMS banners, Marketers are often the ones actually launching the test and crafting the messaging.

Designers

Although the Design Team are more likely to be involved in a fake door test than a painted door test, you may still need them to help create a compelling banner, email, or CTA visual that catches the eye whilst staying on-brand.  

Developers (sometimes)

While many painted door tests require no code, Developers might help set up tracking or a basic button in the product.

Customer Success & Research

These teams can follow up with users who engaged with the painted door test, gathering feedback or inviting them to future betas.

Painted door testing is a team sport – product, marketing, and design each bring the magic.

When should you use a painted door test?

Use them when you need quick, directional data with low risk. It’s as simple as that. It’s worth considering a painted door test whenever you find yourself asking ‘should we do this?’ 

Having said that, as a Product Manager, you ask yourself that question a few times a day right? And you can’t throw up painted door tests for everything – you’d end up creating a website of nonsense and a complicated web of lies that would just peeve your visitors off. So here are the best use cases, then we’ll cover off when NOT to use a painted door test. 

The golden use cases are:

Exploring early ideas

Before a single wireframe exists, find out if the idea is even worth exploring.

Backlog prioritization

Have 3 “maybe” ideas? Painted doors help you see which ones are actually wanted.

Stress-testing a big idea

Expensive features need stronger validation. Use a painted door test to assess demand before sinking time and budget.

Comparing concepts

Not sure which direction to go? Put up multiple painted door tests and let the clicks decide.

Entering new markets

Thinking of targeting a new segment? Painted door tests can sniff out demand with minimal spend.

If the demand is unknown and the risk is high, this is your move.

When should you NOT use a painted door test?

So what is the flipside? When should you put down the paint brush and walk away? Remember, painted door tests aren’t always the right call. Misused, they can do more harm than good.

Here’s when NOT to use a painted door test:

When it could mislead users

If it’s in a critical flow or you’re in a regulated industry, fake doors might undermine trust. You have to be super careful if you’re dealing with a fundamental must-have for your product – if potential customers are making important decisions based on the appearance of a feature that they later find isn’t there, you could get yourself in hot waters. 

For trivial ideas

If it’s quick to build, just build it and A/B test. Painted doors are for bigger bets, or more complicated builds. 

When overused

Show users too many “coming soons” and they’ll tune you out – or worse, lose faith. Do not overdo the painted door test. They are to be used sparingly or you’ll have more dead ends than clear paths and people will get lost! 

If you misread the data

Not every click is intent. Curiosity clicks are a thing, so be conscious of that. Always back up numbers with qualitative feedback. Add a quick survey to your paint door test – when someone hits the landing page or registers their interest with a form, redirect them to a quick survey, as get Customer Teams to follow-up. 

If it could hurt your brand

Running ads for a feature that doesn’t exist? Be ready to explain – or apologize. Don’t overhype what isn’t real or you’ll just annoy people. Get the balance right. 

Use sparingly. Communicate clearly. Always be ready to follow through.

How do you measure a painted door test properly?

This part matters. Otherwise, you’re just chasing vanity metrics. Here’s how to make the data work for you when you’re checking results of a painted door test:

Set your success criteria upfront

Decide what success looks like before you launch. Click-through rate? Email sign-ups? Set targets based on existing benchmarks. You need to know how much interest you’re looking for before you know whether this painted door test has proved out demand. 

Measure the full funnel

Track:

• Impressions (how many people saw it)
• Clicks (how many knocked on the door)
• Actions (how many signed up, gave feedback, etc.)

This helps you separate curiosity from actual demand.

Collect qualitative feedback

As mentioned previously, ask a quick when users click on your painted door test. Ask them “What were you hoping to see?” or “What problem are you hoping this will solve?”. It’s a great chance to get insight that will help you build this feature the right way.  

Segment your data

Are the clickers your power users or drive-by tourists? Segment for deeper clarity.

Compare against your goals

Did you hit your benchmark or flop? Use the results to guide your next steps – not confirm a bias.

What are the best ways to run a painted door test?

The whole point of a painted door test is that it is quick and dirty. You can and should get a painted door test up and running in a matter of minutes. You don’t need fancy tools or deep pockets. In fact, you probably already have what you need.

Here are the different methods thorough which you can launch a painted door test:

CMS banner or site notice

Add a clickable banner to your website. It’s the fastest, code-free option. Add a CTA like “Try our new AI Reports!” and track clicks. On click, show a modal or page saying it’s not live yet and collect emails.

Email campaign

Email your users or your lead database with a tease of the new feature. Include a “Register interest” CTA. On click, direct to a landing page or waitlist.

Dedicated landing page

This is great for testing big ideas or new value props as you can put more messaging around it. Build a quick page (try using Unbounce, Webflow, Wix, or spin one up using Hubspot). Then promote it – on social, with email, maybe even with paid search ads if you think it’s worth a bit of budget. Then your sign-up rate is your signal strength.

Pop-ups or modals

You could put the message directly in front of the users within your product. This can still be low-effort and not demand product changes if you use a tool like Intercom, Pendo, or similar to trigger a modal that overlays your UI. Use it to explain the feature and ask for feedback or interest.

In-app placeholder

Making actual changes to your product – even if just adding a button – is more of a fake door test rather than a painted door test, but if your team can ship quickly, then you could squeeze a button or modal into a quiet sprint and test demand in-app. 

Remember, you don’t have to choose one of these options – you can run a few in combination. 

Real-world examples of painted door tests

Let’s see how these work in the wild. Here are a few examples for different products, using different painted door testing techniques. 

Painted door example 1: SaaS in-app teaser

A PM tool adds a nav item: “AI Reports (Beta).” Click it and get a modal: “Coming Soon – want early access?” Users who click get added to a waitlist.

Painted door example 2: E-commerce “out of stock” test

An online store considering petite sizes adds a page for them – everything marked “Coming Soon.” Users who click “Notify Me” prove there’s demand.

Painted door example 3: Email campaign for B2B feature

An accounting SaaS wants to test a payroll integration. They email users with a teaser and early-access invite. Clicks and sign-ups speak volumes.

Painted door example 4: Consumer app landing page

A language learning app builds a landing page for a “Language Exchange” feature. They promote it via banner and email. High sign-ups = feature validated.

Painted door example 5:  Startup concept showdown

A founder builds two landing pages for two different product ideas. Runs paid ads to both. More clicks = winner chosen.

Fake it before you make it with a painted door test

Painted door tests are the MVP of MVPs. Quick to run, fast to learn from, and brutally honest about what your users actually want.

Used smartly, they help you avoid wasting time, money, and team energy. Just remember: it’s not about the clicks alone. It’s about the why behind them – and what you do next.

Want to build only what matters? Try ProdPad – we help you validate ideas, manage your backlog, and create product roadmaps grounded in real user needs.

The post Nailing the Painted Door Test: When and How to Fake it Before You Make It appeared first on ProdPad.

This is never more important than when you’re part of an organization that’s undergoing some form of digital transformation. Here, even though you’re working on a digital product, your organization will not be used to a digital-first mindset. 

If you’ve joined a company going through digital transformation, where stakeholders are used to physical products or service-based solutions, you’ll need to take them on a journey – helping to bridge the gap between the product approach they’ve used in the past and a new digital product strategy. 

Or perhaps you’re managing a portfolio that spans both physical and digital products. You’ll need to pay close attention to the unique considerations for those digital products and make that distinction clear with a digital product strategy. 

In both cases, thinking about digital product strategy isn’t just a checkbox exercise  – it’s a challenge that needs careful navigation.

A digital product strategy isn’t just a product strategy with “digital” tacked on the front. It’s a long-term plan that accounts for the unique dynamics of digital products, including faster iteration cycles, evolving user expectations, data-driven decision-making, and ongoing optimization. 

Reckon you need a digital product strategy? No problem.

Let’s talk through the steps to build a digital product strategy that fits the needs of your product, business, and customers. We’ll introduce a new framework to help transform your product strategy into a digital product strategy. 

That framework is something I like to call Digivolution. If you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the early 00s, you may recognize that phrase . 

Let’s dig in. 

What is a digital product strategy? 

At its core, a digital product strategy is much like the product strategy you know and use, being a guide for how the product will be managed to achieve your business goals. It includes all the common components – like product vision, customer insights, and market analysis – but is crafted through a digital-focused lens. 

The structure and documentation might look the same, but the considerations and approaches need to be fundamentally different. 

When going through a digital transformation, it can be easy to create a product strategy that forgets to consider the main factors of a digital environment, as opposed to the physical focus your business may be used to. This oversight can lead to misalignment between strategy and execution. A digital product strategy ensures that the unique characteristics of digital products are addressed, including:

• Different pricing models: Digital products often use subscriptions, freemium models, or pay-as-you-go structures instead of one-time purchases.
• Product-led growth: Digital products rely more on self-serve adoption, network effects, and viral loops than traditional sales-driven approaches.
• Distinct user interactions: Customers experience digital products through interfaces, workflows, and automation rather than physical touchpoints.
• Unique challenges and friction points: Onboarding, engagement, and retention require different strategies than in physical products.
• Rapid iteration and evolution: Unlike physical products, digital products can be updated continuously, demanding an agile, data-driven Product Management strategy.

A digital product strategy isn’t just about acknowledging these differences between a physical product and a digital one – it’s about building a strategy that actively accounts for them.

It’s very similar to how there are various specialized Product Manager roles. An AI Product Manager or Growth Product Manager still follows core PM principles, but the role title makes explicit the particular focus they need to have. Similarly, a digital product strategy follows traditional strategy principles but adapts them to the digital landscape.

So, as with any product strategy, a digital version defines how your product will achieve its goals while aligning with the overarching business objectives. It’s not a plan, it’s a guiding system that helps you: 

Define your product vision
Understand customer needs
Prioritize key initiatives
Establish success metrics
Navigate the digital landscape effectively

Key differences between a product strategy for physical products and a digital product strategy

Let’s look at the difference between digital and physical products and see how that impacts the strategy. Knowing this is key for Product Managers who manage a portfolio that mixes digital and physical products (like hardware and software), or PMs who are guiding a company through a digital transformation.

Still don’t think you need to specifically worry about creating a unique strategy for your digital product? Here are some of the core characteristics of a digital product in more detail to help you out:

Speed and Iteration

Digital products evolve continuously, unlike physical products with fixed lifecycles.

Product strategies for physical products revolve around a linear lifecycle – development, launch, and eventual obsolescence. In contrast, digital products are in a state of continuous improvement. 

Regular updates, feature rollouts, and rapid iterations mean that your strategy must be flexible, prioritizing agility over long-term fixed plans. This requires adopting frameworks like Agile and Lean methodologies, ensuring that teams can pivot quickly based on user feedback and market demands.

Data-driven decisions

Digital product strategy relies on real-time analytics, not just upfront research.

Digital product strategies are dynamic, leveraging real-time analytics to inform decisions. This changes how you build your digital product strategy.

Continuous monitoring of user behavior, A/B testing, and predictive analytics allow Product Teams to refine their approach instantly. This means that product strategies must integrate data collection mechanisms from day one, so you can actively use insights to optimize user experiences, pricing models, and feature development.

Ecosystem thinking

Digital products integrate into platforms, APIs, and marketplaces rather than existing in isolation.

Unlike physical products that function independently, digital products thrive in interconnected ecosystems. Whether integrating with third-party APIs, being part of a SaaS marketplace, or leveraging cloud-based services, digital product strategies must factor in partnerships, interoperability, and network effects. 

This shifts strategic priorities and goals toward compatibility, seamless integrations, and creating value within an ecosystem rather than just focusing on standalone features.

Customer retention and growth loops

Unlike one-time purchases, digital products depend on engagement, subscriptions, and viral growth.

For traditional products, success is often measured by unit sales. Digital products, however, rely on ongoing user engagement and retention. Your digital product strategy should include mechanisms that help build this like personalized onboarding, habit-forming designs that follow the Hook Model, and incentives that encourage user advocacy. 

Scalability and tech considerations

Digital strategies must account for scalability, security, and AI-driven features.

Unlike physical products with fixed production limits, digital products can scale exponentially, but only if built with the right infrastructure. Scalability isn’t just about handling more users; it includes cloud computing decisions, database management, and automation. 

Security is also a critical consideration, as digital products handle sensitive user data and must comply with regulations like GDPR. Plus, AI and machine learning are increasingly shaping digital strategies, enabling personalized recommendations, automation, and predictive analytics to enhance user experiences.

What goes into a digital product strategy?

As we’ve said, a digital product strategy is similar to a physical one, just with an explicit focus on making sure you consider the nuances of managing a digital product. It includes the same core elements as any product strategy – just with a modern, adaptable approach. 

At its foundation, a product strategy defines what you’re building, who it’s for, why it matters, and how you’ll bring it to market. It typically covers:

• Product vision: The long-term goal and purpose of the product.
• Customer insights: An understanding of the target audience, their needs, and pain points.
• Market analysis: Research findings into the competitive landscape, trends, and broader market dynamics.
• Goals & KPIs: Your definition of success through measurable outcomes.
• Roadmap & execution plan: An outline of how the product will evolve over time.

However, building a digital product strategy requires an evolved framework. To make your strategy fit for the digital world, you need a framework that adapts to the nature of digital ecosystems, user behaviors, and rapid technological advancements. 

If you’re transforming an existing product strategy used for physical products to suit a new digital product, or if you’re making a strategy for your digital products alongside physical ones, you need to scrutinize your existing strategy and refine it through a digital-first lens. 

Every assumption, goal, and approach that worked so well for a physical product should be re-evaluated to ensure it aligns with how digital products are built, sold, and scaled.

This can be a daunting task. Trying to retrofit a physical product strategy without a structured framework can lead to gaps, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.

That’s where Digivolution comes in.

Introducing Digivolution – evolving your product strategy for digital

Digivolution is a useful process to follow to ensure your product strategy fully embraces the realities of digital products. It helps take a previous strategy and evolve it for online products and services, addressing the unique challenges that come with them.

If you watched Saturday Cartoons in the early 00s, you might recognize the term from Digimon, where creatures “digivolve” into more powerful versions of themselves. Think of Agumon, the small yellow dino. When he digivolves, he transforms into an armored T-Rex – stronger, faster, and way more capable. 

That’s exactly what you’re doing with your product strategy: upgrading it to handle the digital landscape more effectively.

Instead of force-fitting old-school product frameworks onto digital products, Digivolution helps you systematically refine each stage of your product strategy. From pricing models to engagement loops, every element is optimized for digital success, so your strategy isn’t just functional, it’s built to thrive.

How to create your digital product strategy

Let’s walk through what you need to do with your product strategy to make it properly suited for your digital product. 

The process follows general product strategy steps but with a digital-first mindset at every stage.

Step 1: Define your product vision

Traditional Approach: Define your long-term vision, identify market fit, and clarify the problem your product solves and how you want it to grow. You can do that by creating a product vision statement or by following our free product vision template.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products don’t exist in isolation: they live in ecosystems. Your vision must account for platform scalability, integrations, and network effects to ensure long-term viability. Think beyond just what the product does today and consider how it will evolve in a constantly changing digital landscape.

• Ask: How will this product integrate with existing digital platforms and services?
• Think about your product architecture and plan for growth. Can features be expanded or adapted easily?
• Consider AI, automation, and emerging tech that could shape future iterations.

Step 2: Understand your customers

Traditional Approach: Develop detailed user personas based on demographics, behaviors, and pain points. Conduct surveys and focus groups to gather qualitative insights.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products generate real-time customer data, so don’t just rely on static personas – use live product analytics to understand behavior and hone in on your ideal customer.

• Implement heatmaps, session recordings, and A/B testing to track how users actually interact with your product.
• Use cohort analysis to see how different demographics of users are engaging with your product.
• Leverage AI-driven personalization to tailor experiences dynamically, and build user profiles to get a sense of your users based on real facts, not assumptions.

Traditional persona: “Sarah, 32, a busy Marketing Manager who needs better team collaboration.”
Digivolved insight: “Users who invite 3+ team members within their first week have a 70% retention rate. This shows that your strategy should optimize onboarding for team invites.”

Step 3: Set your outcomes & goals

Traditional Approach: Establish SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to track product success. These goals often focus on revenue, market share, or product adoption within a set timeframe.

How to Digivolve It: Traditional sales-driven goals don’t always capture the continuous, user-driven nature of digital products. Instead, focus on engagement, retention, and monetization metrics that reflect real user value.

• Prioritize engagement metrics like Daily Active Users (DAUs), session length, and feature adoption rates.
• Optimize for retention – set goals around customer churn reduction and cohort retention rates.
• Think in growth loops: What actions drive the different types of growth loops?
• Revenue isn’t just about sales anymore: track Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) as well.

Traditional goal: “Sell 10,000 units of the product in the first year.”
Digivolved goal: “Increase MRR by 15% in Q3 by optimizing onboarding to boost trial-to-paid conversions.”

Step 4: Establish KPIs & success metrics

Traditional Approach: Choose key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue growth, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

How to Digivolve It: Some business KPIs don’t always apply to subscription models, freemium structures, or SaaS offerings. Your KPIs must reflect the realities of digital engagement. Look at:

• Activation rate: How many users take the key first step that leads to long-term use?
• Churn rate: How quickly do users abandon your product, and why?
• Feature adoption: Are users actually using the features that drive business value?
• Virality metrics: Referral rates, social sharing, and organic growth indicators.

Step 5: Define your action plan

Traditional Approach: Develop a product roadmap with key milestones, dependencies, and execution timelines. Planning often follows a fixed schedule.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products thrive on agility and iteration – your action plan should focus on continuous improvement rather than rigid milestones.

• Adopt an agile roadmap like Now-Next-Later with broad time horizons rather than  rigid feature deadlines..
• Plan for continuous deployment rather than a fixed “launch and leave” mentality that leads to feature creep.
• Use customer feedback loops at every stage – your strategy should evolve based on real-world usage, not just internal assumptions.

Traditional roadmap: “Feature X launches on Feb 2, Feature Y on Apr 14.”
Digivolved roadmap: We want to solve this problem now, and we’ll prioritize this other problem next.“

Your product roadmap is one of the core ways you can communicate your digital product strategy. Because of that, you’re going to want a powerful and effective product roadmap tool. ProdPad offers just that, working as a centralized product ecosystem where you can tie your product strategy and objectives to your roadmap Initiatives and Ideas. 

Check out our interactive template to have a go yourself.

The power of digivolving your product strategy

Switching from physical to digital products doesn’t just change what you build, it changes how you think about strategy. The key difference is adaptability: instead of static planning, digital product strategies are living, breathing frameworks that evolve based on real-time user behavior, rapid iterations, and ecosystem shifts.

By applying the Digivolution framework, you ensure that your product strategy isn’t just a copy-paste of traditional methods that worked for physical products, it’s built for the realities of the digital world.

As you go through a digital transformation, you’re already going to have a product strategy, but the question is: have they truly made it digital-focused?

With ProdPad, you can easily create a digital product strategy through your product roadmap. Try ProdPad today for free to get started and improve the way you manage your digital product. 

The post Digital Product Strategy Guide: How to ‘Digivolve’ Your Product Strategy appeared first on ProdPad.

But not all adoption metrics are created equal or relevant at the same time. Measuring product adoption isn’t just about looking at a handful of stats in isolation. It’s about understanding when and why each metric matters across different stages of the user journey.

That’s what makes this guide different. 

We’re breaking down the best product adoption metrics and mapping them to key user journey stages so you can measure product adoption with precision.

Let’s dive in.

What is a product adoption? 

Product adoption happens when a user moves beyond signing up. They reach a key activation point, experience the value proposition of your product, and make it a regular part of their workflow.

Simply getting users through the door isn’t enough. Someone might download your app, create an account, or even start a reverse trial, and then ghost you. If they never come back, they haven’t adopted your product. True adoption means they’ve engaged with it meaningfully, integrated it into their routine, and see its ongoing value.

Product adoption usually happens after user activation, the moment when a user experiences the core benefit of your product for the first time. This is known as the wow moment (or aha moment). 

Once a user has completed this action, they’re more likely to stick around and fully adopt the product. 

As a Product Manager, your job is to guide users toward product adoption as quickly as possible. The faster they reach that moment of value, the more likely they’ll be to stay put.

Why should you measure product adoption metrics? 

Product adoption metrics provide deeper insights than surface-level stats. They tell you not just how many people show up to the party but whether they’re actually sticking around to buy a drink.

Take signups, for example. If a million people create an account, download your app, and then never return, traditional metrics might still paint a rosy picture. But product adoption data reveals the truth: if users aren’t engaging beyond the first touch, your product isn’t landing the way it should.

Without that insight, you risk a false sense of security. Paid signups may look great on paper, but if users never reach their wow moment they won’t stick around for renewal.

Put simply? Product adoption metrics track behavior, making them invaluable for identifying pain points, testing assumptions, and spotting where users drop off. They help you:

1⃣ Spot friction points: Understand where users struggle and why they disengage.
2⃣ Refine your onboarding: Guide users to activation faster and more effectively.
3⃣ Validate feature success: See which updates drive real engagement (and which don’t).
4⃣ Align teams on priorities: Give product, customer success, and marketing a shared source of truth.
5⃣ Prove long-term value: Adoption data is a powerful story for investors, showing not just traction but sustainable growth.

Ultimately, product adoption isn’t just about tracking usage—it’s about understanding what keeps users coming back so you can build a product that thrives.

15 product adoption metrics you should know

Most articles throw adoption metrics at you without much context. We’re not going to do that.

Instead, this list will follow the customer journey – so you’ll know not just what to track, but when to track it, depending on what insights you’re after.

From first touch to churn risk, here are the key stages:

Acquisition: Getting users to sign up or engage for the first time.
Activation: Ensuring they experience the product’s core value early.
Onboarding: Helping users learn how to navigate a product.
Engagement: Encouraging active usage of key features.
Adoption: Getting users to make the product part of their routine.
Retention: Keeping them engaged and coming back consistently.
Churn Risk: Spotting when users are disengaging and at risk of leaving.

And now, here are 15 product adoption metrics: laid out in order of where they fit best in the journey, so you can track exactly what matters at every stage:

1. Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. Essentially, it shows how successful you are at turning potential users into active customers.

The definition of a “converted user” can vary depending on the context. For example, in a free trial scenario, a conversion might be someone upgrading to the paid version. If you’re a Product Marketing Manager tracking the impact of a marketing campaign, a conversion could mean users who accessed your product through a promotion.

Why is conversion rate a great metric? Well, it directly reflects the effectiveness of your onboarding process, sales funnel, and marketing strategies. By understanding how many users are transitioning from interest to action, you can identify any friction points or opportunities for improvement in driving user adoption. 

Ultimately, tracking this metric helps you assess how well you’re getting people through the door and getting them to stick around.

2. Activation rate

Activation rate measures the percentage of users who reach a specific activation threshold, which typically means they’ve experienced the core value of your product. This is a key indicator of user engagement and product fit, as it shows how many users get to the point where they truly understand the problems your product solves.

While conversion rate can measure various actions like trial-to-paid or marketing campaign responses, activation rate is specifically focused on the moment when a user has interacted with your product enough to reach that wow moment.

Activation rate is important because it highlights how effective your onboarding process is and whether users are able to quickly experience the value your product promises. A high activation rate typically leads to better retention and long-term engagement, making it a crucial metric to track as part of your overall adoption strategy.

Learn more about user activation and how to improve it:

3. Time to First Value

Time to First Value (TTFV) measures how long it takes for a new user to experience their first meaningful benefit from your product. It’s a critical metric because the faster users see value, the more likely they are to continue engaging.

This is different from Time to Value (TTV), which tracks how long it takes for a user to gain full, long-term value from the product. TTFV focuses on the initial wow moment, whether that’s completing a key action, using a core feature, or achieving a small win.

A shorter time to first value means a smoother onboarding experience, leading to higher activation and retention rates. If TTFV is too long, users may drop off before realizing what makes your product valuable. Optimizing onboarding flows and reducing friction points can help users reach value faster, increasing overall adoption.

There’s a lot more to get into when it comes to Time to Value. Learn more:

4. Onboarding completion rate

The onboarding completion rate measures the percentage of users who complete your onboarding process. It’s a key indicator of how effective your onboarding experience is at guiding users toward activation and adoption.

A high onboarding completion rate means users are successfully navigating the steps needed to get started with your product. A low rate, on the other hand, signals friction, whether that’s down to a confusing setup process, too many steps, or unclear guidance.

Improving this metric is important because users who don’t complete onboarding are far less likely to stick around. Streamlining the process, reducing complexity, and offering in-app guidance can all help.

For more on user onboarding, check out our tips on how to give a product tour:

5. Session duration

Session duration measures how long users actively engage with your product in a single visit. While looking at one user’s session length in isolation won’t tell you much, averaging session duration across all users or specific cohorts provides a clearer picture of engagement.

A higher average session duration often indicates that users find your product valuable and engaging, while shorter sessions may suggest friction, lack of interest, or difficulty navigating key features. 

However, context matters. Long sessions aren’t always a good thing if they’re a result from users struggling to complete tasks.

Tracking session duration alongside other metrics, like feature usage or task completion rates, helps you understand how users interact with your product. If your session duration is lower than expected, consider improving UX, or adding in-app guidance to keep users engaged for longer.

6. Feature usage frequency

Feature usage frequency tells you how often users interact with specific features in your product. Usage frequency can be measured based on different timeframes. The right frequency metric depends on how often you expect users to engage. 

Are you building a tool meant for daily use, or is weekly or monthly engagement more realistic? You have three primary options to focus on:

• DAU (Daily Active Users): Measures the number of unique users engaging with a feature daily. Ideal for products that rely on frequent engagement, like communication tools or social apps.
• WAU (Weekly Active Users): Tracks the number of users who interact with a feature at least once per week. This is useful for products where regular, but not necessarily daily, usage is expected, like project management tools.
• MAU (Monthly Active Users): Measures unique users who engage with a feature over a month. Best for products with less frequent usage, like subscription-based platforms or financial tools.

Tracking the right feature usage frequency helps you understand engagement patterns and identify opportunities to improve stickiness and retention.

7. Product engagement score (PES)

The Product Engagement Score (PES) is a combined metric that gives you a more complete picture of how well users are adopting and engaging with your product. Rather than looking at individual numbers in isolation, PES brings together three key metrics:

• Product Adoption Rate: Measures how many new users are actively adopting your product over time.
• Product Stickiness: Compares daily or weekly active users to monthly active users, showing how frequently users return.
• Product Growth Rate: Tracks how fast your user base is expanding.

By combining these three data points, PES provides a high-level engagement snapshot that helps teams quickly assess overall performance. A strong score suggests users are not only trying your product but sticking with it and spreading the word. If your PES is low, it’s a sign to dig into the individual metrics to uncover areas for improvement.

Here’s more on product engagement score: 

8. Product adoption rate

Product adoption rate measures the percentage of new users who go beyond signing up and start actively using your product. It’s a critical metric for understanding how successful you are at turning interest into sustained engagement.

A high adoption rate means users are quickly seeing value and integrating your product into their workflow. A low rate suggests friction in onboarding, unclear value propositions, or gaps in feature usability.

Tracking the adoption rate helps teams identify bottlenecks and optimize the user experience. If you want more users to stick around, focus on reducing time to first value and refining your core feature set.

9. Feature adoption rate

Feature adoption rate is like product adoption rate’s more detail-oriented sibling. Instead of measuring overall product adoption, this metric focuses on how many users are actively engaging with a single feature.

Tracking feature adoption helps you understand which features are resonating and which are being ignored. If a new feature isn’t getting traction, it could signal issues with discoverability, usability, or value perception.

To improve feature adoption, you need to make a new feature stick by implementing strategies like in-app guidance, tooltips, and email nudges that highlight its value. The more effectively you introduce and integrate new features, the higher your chances of driving long-term engagement. If you want to learn more about feature adoption rate – and its brother product adoption rate for that matter – we’ve got an in-depth deep dive on both: 

10. Product stickiness

Product stickiness tells you how often users return to your product within a given timeframe. The key here is choosing the right timeframe based on how frequently you expect users to engage.

For products designed for daily use you’ll want to track Daily Active Users (DAU) ÷ Weekly Active Users (WAU). This helps measure whether users keep coming back day after day.

For less frequently used products Weekly Active Users (WAU) ÷ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a better fit. This tells you whether users are consistently engaging over longer periods.

A high stickiness rate means your product is valuable and habit-forming. A low rate could signal friction in the user experience or a lack of compelling reasons for users to return.

11. User retention rate

User retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue using your product over a given period. It’s a key indicator of how well your product delivers ongoing value and whether users find it worth sticking with.

A high retention rate means users are engaged and see your product as essential. A low retention rate, on the other hand, could signal issues with user experience, lack of value, or competition pulling users away.

To improve retention, focus on delivering continuous value and addressing pain points before users churn. Tracking retention alongside other metrics like product stickiness (which we’ve just mentioned) and churn rate (we’ll get to that) gives you a clearer picture of long-term user engagement.

Learn more about user retention: 

12. Customer satisfaction scores

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a straightforward way to gauge how happy users are with your product. It’s calculated by asking users to rate their experience and determining the percentage of positive responses.

But what’s a positive response? Well, say in your survey you ask to get rated out of 5. All your scores of 4 and 5 can be considered a positive response. 

CSAT helps you quickly assess user sentiment, identify pain points, and improve areas of your product that might be falling short. Since it relies on direct user feedback, it’s an essential tool for keeping a pulse on customer happiness. If you want to boost your CSAT, start by learning how to collect customer feedback in 2025.

13. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key customer experience metric used to measure customer loyalty. It asks users how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others, using a scale from 0 to 10.

Scores of 9-10 are considered “Promoters,” people who are enthusiastic about your product and likely to spread the word. Scores of 0-6 are “Detractors,” users who are unhappy and may hinder growth. Those in the middle (7-8) are “Passives,” and while they are satisfied, they don’t directly influence your NPS score.

By calculating the NPS, you get a clear picture of your customer’s loyalty and satisfaction, helping to identify areas for improvement and strengthen customer relationships.

14. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that helps you understand the total revenue a customer is likely to generate for your business during their relationship with your product or service. It gives you a clear picture of how much each customer is worth in the long run, helping you make more informed decisions on customer acquisition and retention strategies.

To calculate CLV, you’ll need two other key metrics:

1. Customer Value: This is calculated by multiplying the average purchase value by the purchase frequency. In other words, how much does each customer spend per transaction and how often do they make a purchase?
   
2. Average Customer Lifespan: This measures the average duration a customer remains active with your business, either in years or months. It gives you an idea of how long customers typically stick around.

Once you have these figures, you can multiply them to calculate your overall CLV. Understanding CLV allows you to make data-driven decisions about marketing spend, customer retention efforts, and overall growth strategies, ensuring you prioritize long-term value over short-term gains.

15. Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a specific time period. It’s an essential metric because it helps you understand how well you’re retaining customers and if there are any underlying issues driving users away. A high churn rate may indicate dissatisfaction with your product, poor user experience, or stronger competition, while a low churn rate suggests you’re successfully meeting customer needs.

By tracking churn, you can identify patterns or pain points in your product or customer experience that need attention. Lowering your churn rate is key to long-term success, as retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

Learn more about customer churn:

How do I choose the right product adoption metrics? 

You don’t need to track every adoption metric under the sun. In fact, tracking too many can lead to information overload, making it harder to get actionable insights. Instead, you should focus on the few that best align with what you’re trying to learn.

But how do you whittle it down?

Every metric on our list is useful, but not all will be useful right now. The key is to choose metrics based on what you want to uncover. Specifically, the metrics you choose need to help you answer:

• Who is adopting your product?
• What features do they love?
• When does adoption happen?
• How long do adopted users stay?

And because no two products are the same, the best metric for one company may not be as relevant for another. That’s why your objectives dictate which metrics matter most.

For example:

• If your goal is to improve activation, you should focus on Activation Rate over PES.
• If you’re trying to increase feature engagement, tracking Feature Adoption Rate makes more sense than measuring Session Duration.
• If your priority is long-term retention, then Customer Retention Rate will tell you more than CSAT scores.

By aligning your metrics with your goals, you ensure that what you’re measuring actually helps you make informed decisions – without drowning in data.

You’ll also likely find that your current objectives will focus your attention on a specific part of the customer journey. This is why this list has been structured this way, as it can help you pinpoint the best metrics for your main aim. 

• Early journey: If you’re focused on getting users in the door and experiencing value quickly, metrics like Conversion Rate and Activation Rate will tell you if your onboarding is working.
• Mid-journey: If you want to ensure users are integrating your product into their workflow, Feature Adoption Rate and Product Stickiness (DAU/WAU/MAU) show how often they return.
• Late journey: If your goal is to reduce churn, you’ll want to monitor Customer Retention Rate and Churn Rate to catch disengaged users before they leave.

By aligning metrics with the customer journey, you’re not just collecting data—you’re getting the right insights at the right time.

Want to know more about matching metrics with your objectives – check out our free OKR Course

How do I measure product adoption metrics? 

Chosen your key product adoption metrics? Great. Now let’s talk about how to measure them effectively.

How often should I measure product adoption metrics?

The frequency depends on the metric. Some adoption metrics, like Sign-Up Rate or Activation Rate, should be tracked daily or weekly to spot trends early. Others, like Feature Adoption Rate or Customer Retention Rate, may be better suited for monthly or quarterly reviews to see long-term patterns.

A good rule of thumb: Shorter cycles for early-stage adoption, longer cycles for retention and churn.

Where do I measure product adoption metrics?

Tracking adoption requires product analytics tools, platforms that integrate with your product to monitor user behavior, feature usage, and engagement. These tools let you:

• See trends across your entire user base (e.g., how many users activate per week)
• Drill down into individual user journeys (e.g., where a specific user drops off in onboarding)
• Customize dashboards and reports to match your product’s unique goals

The best product analytics tools are easy to use, flexible, and packed with insights. If you’re looking for recommendations, check out our list:

Who is responsible for measuring product adoption metrics?

The Product Manager is typically the main person responsible for gathering and analyzing product adoption metrics. They track these metrics to understand how users engage with the product, identify barriers to adoption, and prioritize improvements.

However, product adoption isn’t just a Product Manager’s job, multiple teams rely on these insights to optimize their own strategies:

• Product Teams use adoption data to refine onboarding, improve UX, and prioritize feature development.
• Customer Success Teams leverage adoption insights to identify struggling users, offer proactive support, and reduce churn risk.
• Marketing Teams track which acquisition channels bring in the most engaged users and refine their messaging to attract more of them.
• Sales Teams use adoption data to highlight key benefits, handle objections, and showcase product value to potential customers.

Since product adoption metrics affect nearly every aspect of the business, cross-team collaboration is essential. The best results come when teams share adoption data and align their strategies to improve the overall user experience.

What do I do after measuring product adoption?

Measuring adoption is just the start: the real value comes from using that data to drive action. Once you’ve gathered insights, you should:

1⃣ Identify friction points: Where are users dropping off? What’s stopping them from fully adopting the product?
2⃣ Experiment & iterate: Test different onboarding flows, feature prompts, or engagement nudges to improve adoption rates.
3⃣ Segment your users: Compare adoption metrics across different user groups to see who’s thriving and who needs help.
4⃣ Align your roadmap: Use adoption data to prioritize improvements that will have the biggest impact on retention.

By continuously measuring and acting on product adoption metrics, you’re not just tracking success, you’re actively driving it.

Measuring for success 

That list of product adoption metrics should keep you occupied for a while, and narrow down the metrics that are worth tracking – but crucially only when they match your objectives. 

Don’t see this list as the 15 product adoption metrics you need to track. It’s more of a catalog of metrics that you can choose from. And now, you should know how to choose which ones best suit you. 

Now, this list only covers product adoption metrics. There are a hell of a lot more wider product metrics and KPIs that you need to be aware of. Well, good job that we’ve gathered all the worthwhile ones and put them into this nice, easy-to-read eBook. 

Download it now and learn which metrics you should have in the back of your mind: 

The post 15 Product Adoption Metrics: How to Measure Product Adoption in 2025 appeared first on ProdPad.

Whether you’re a recent hire and want to take stock of what you’re working with, or are trying to discover ways to re-ignite a product that’s lost steam, product analysis is going to help you.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand through product analysis, covering what it is, how you do it, plus many other things. 

Here’s a table of contents so that you can jump around:

What is product analysis? 

Product analysis is the process of evaluating a product using both quantitative and qualitative research to answer strategic questions. It helps teams uncover what’s working, what’s not, and why. By digging into data, customer feedback, and user behavior, product analysis provides clarity on trends, pain points, and opportunities – turning raw insights into actionable decisions.

At its core, product analysis is about getting to the ‘why’ behind the numbers and behaviors.

There are a lot of ways to do product analysis, which we’ll cover later, but most of the time it involves systematically assessing how a product is used, where it excels, and where it can be improved. 

Three key parts of product analysis

Product analysis has three main components. These are: 

1. Market analysis: Understanding industry trends, consumer behavior, and product positioning and perception to ensure your product stays relevant and competitive.
2. Competitor analysis: Knowing what your rivals are up to helps you find gaps, refine your positioning, and stay ahead of the game. 
3. Customer feedback & insights: Listening to your users to hear what’s working, what’s frustrating, and what they actually want from your product. 

Think of these three things as the primary colors of product analysis. They set the base foundation, but there are still a lot more colors and analysis methods to use – we’ll dive deeper into those later.

Why do product analysis?

Regularly analyzing a product isn’t just a nice thing to do from time to time – it’s essential for building and maintaining a successful product. Here’s why:

• Smarter decision-making: Product Teams have to weigh up constant trade-offs. Conducting research-based analysis and analyzing real data ensures choices are driven by facts rather than assumptions, reducing risk and uncertainty.
• Improved user experience: By learning about potential issues and frustrations from a user perspective, product analysis helps create a smoother, more enjoyable experience that keeps customers engaged.
• Competitive advantage: The market moves fast, and competitors are always improving. Analyzing trends and customer needs ensures a product stays relevant and ahead of the curve.
• Better prioritization: Not all feedback or issues carry the same weight. Product analysis highlights which changes will have the most significant impact, helping teams focus their time and resources on the right things.
• Sustained growth: A product that doesn’t evolve stagnates like a pond. Ongoing analysis ensures a product continues to meet business objectives and customer expectations over time.

Product analysis vs competitive product analysis 

You can run product analysis on any product. So that could be the product you are responsible for, or a competitor product (or any product in between). 

Obviously, when conducting product analysis on your own product, you have access to more information – like usage data, customer feedback, revenue numbers – and with competitive product analysis you’ll have to use slightly different approaches, but the principles are the same. You’re assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a product.  

There is crossover here though. Analysis of your own product should always include a degree of competitive product analysis so you understand how your product stacks up against competitors and what position it holds in the market. 

In a nutshell, the difference between product analysis and competitor product analysis is about the direction you’re looking at when conducting your research:

• Product analysis focuses on assessing your own product’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. It’s an introspective look that helps teams refine features, fix issues, and better serve users.
• Competitive product analysis (also called competitive analysis) looks outward, examining competing products to understand their features, positioning, and market strategies. This helps identify gaps, differentiate offerings, and stay ahead in the market.

Check out our full guide on competitor product analysis to learn more: 

What are the different types of product analysis? 

So far we’ve discussed product analysis in its broadest sense. But product analysis is kind of like a Russian doll, hiding other analysis methods within it. It’s now time to open the doll up and see what else nestles within product analysis. 

The truth is that there are a lot of different ways to conduct product analysis. Product analysis is a combination of various research and evaluation techniques. Here are some of the most common types that expand on the core three:

• Customer research – Get inside your users’ heads by exploring their behaviors, pain points, and needs through surveys, interviews, and behavioral tracking.
• Market research – Analyze industry trends, market size, and customer demand to make sure your product has a strong, competitive position.
• Competitor research – Study competing products to find market gaps, opportunities, and ways to stand out.
• Performance analysis – Track key metrics like user engagement, retention, and conversion rates to measure success and optimize growth.
• Pricing analysis – Dive into pricing strategies, customer willingness to pay, and market positioning to fine-tune your revenue model.
• UX/usability analysis – Test how users interact with your product to identify friction points and improve the overall experience.
• Feasibility analysis – Determine whether a product or feature is viable from a technical, financial, and operational standpoint before diving in.

Each of these areas includes multiple methods of analysis, allowing teams to uncover insights that shape their product strategy. Let’s take a look at some of the common methods for product analysis: 

Customer research

Customer research focuses on understanding your customers’ perceptions and experiences with your product. This qualitative approach provides insights into customer needs, preferences, and areas for improvement. Effective methods include:

• Surveys: Structured questionnaires that can be built in-app that gather quantitative and qualitative data on customer satisfaction, preferences, and expectations.
• Interviews: In-depth, one-on-one discussions that explore individual customer experiences, uncovering detailed insights into their interactions with your product.
• Customer Advisory Board (CAB) Meetings: Regular meetings with a selected group of customers who provide strategic feedback and guidance on product development and improvements.
• Net promoter score (NPS): A metric that measures customer loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend your product to others, providing an indicator of overall satisfaction.

All of this revolves around the customer feedback loop. To get the best feedback, you need to train your Customer Support Teams on how to gather it all properly. Luckily we have you covered. Check out the guide which comes with a downloadable presentation deck for you to use with your Customer Teams.

Market research

Market research involves analyzing external factors that influence your product’s success, such as market trends, customer segments, and competitors. Key methods include:

• User personas: Creating detailed profiles representing different segments of your target audience to better understand their needs and tailor your product accordingly.
• Market validation: Assessing the demand for your product or feature through techniques like surveys, interviews, or crowdfunding campaigns to ensure it meets market needs.
• Prototyping and beta testing: Releasing a pre-launch, MVP version of your product to a limited audience to assess market reaction, demand, and identify potential improvements.

Competitor research 

Competitor research is all about analyzing competitor products, strategies, and market positions to identify opportunities and threats, informing your product development and positioning.

A couple of ways to learn about your competitors include:

• Strategic canvas: Scoring each competitor based on a specific value element like price, performance, usability, etc. With these scores, you can see where your product excels compared to your competitors, and find opportunities to improve. 
• Product benchmarking: Comparing your product’s performance, features, and processes against industry standards or competitors to identify best practices and areas for enhancement.

Performance analysis

Performance analysis is where your product analytics comes in, focusing on quantitative data to assess how well your product is performing. This involves tracking user behavior and measuring key metrics to help you understand how successfully your product is being adopted and engaged with, informing data-driven decisions. 

When looking at your product analytics, track important performance metrics like: 

• Adoption rate: The percentage of new users adopting your product over a specific period, indicating market acceptance and growth.
• Monthly active users (MAU): The number of unique users engaging with your product monthly, reflecting user retention and engagement.
• Customer churn rate: The percentage of users who stop using your product over a given timeframe, highlighting potential issues with satisfaction or value.
• User retention: The ability of your product to retain users over time, indicating long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

That’s of course only a handful of metrics you can track. We’ve got a full list of Product KPIs to help you identify the right ones for you.

In addition to capturing product usage data and tracking metrics, you can uncover more about your product’s performance by conducting analysis methodologies like cohort analysis. 

Here you can assess the impact of any changes you make to the product by comparing groups of users over time – for example, comparing the users who used the product or feature before the change was implemented versus those who used the product afterwards. 

A quick note on tools for product analysis

You’re going to need the right tools to ensure you have the product analytics you need to conduct performance product analysis. We’ve got a list of the best product analytics tools you can check out:

Pricing analysis: 

Pricing analysis is all about seeing how the way you structure your product pricing impacts sales and customer perception. 

Here are some ways to analyze your pricing strategy:

• Demand elasticity: Analyzing how changes in price affect the quantity demanded, helping to optimize pricing for revenue and market share.
• Van Westendorp price sensitivity: A survey-based technique that identifies acceptable price ranges by asking customers about their price perceptions.
• Gabor-Granger pricing method: A technique that determines the optimal price point by assessing customers’ willingness to pay at different price levels.

You can learn more about all three of these methods in our price testing article:

UX analysis: 

User experience (UX) analysis examines how users interact with your product to identify usability issues and enhance overall satisfaction. Methods include:

• Session replays: Recording and reviewing user interactions to observe behaviors, identify pain points, and improve interface design.
• User journey mapping: Visualizing the steps users take to achieve their goals with your product, highlighting opportunities to streamline processes and enhance experience.
• A/B Testing: Comparing two versions of a product feature to determine which performs better, enabling data-driven design decisions.
• HEART Framework: A set of metrics – Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success – used to evaluate user experience and guide improvements.

Feasibility analysis: 

Feasibility analysis is a type of product analysis that you do when you’ve got an idea for a new feature or update. Here, you’re checking to see if the proposed idea is something that can actually be done on a technical level. 

One major way to do this is to look at and review your product architecture to see if your proposal fits in with your current system. Other analysis methods include: 

• Assess technological requirements and resources: Determining the technical needs and resources necessary for development to ensure alignment with your organization’s capabilities.
• Review technical debt: Identifying existing technical debt that could impact the development or performance of the new feature, ensuring sustainable progress.

Who does product analysis?

Product analysis is a cross-functional task involving various teams to ensure you get a holistic view of your product’s performance. The following people chip in:

• Product Managers: You will lead the analysis and make decisions based on the data.
• Data Analysts: They help with deep data analysis, especially when dealing with large datasets and complex models.
• UX/UI Designers: Work to understand user behavior and identify usability issues.
• Marketing Teams: Can provide insights into how the product is being received, what else is happening in the market, and help assess engagement metrics.
• Developers: Provide technical feedback on product performance and how data is captured.

When do you perform product analysis?

You’ll be diving into product analysis at various stages throughout your product lifecycle – whether you’re gathering feedback on a new feature, fine-tuning an existing one, or taking a step back to assess your overall product strategy. That said, there are key moments when product analysis is essential to keep things on track:

Product analysis when launching a new product or company

When you’re just starting out, whether as a new startup or introducing a new product, understanding where your offering fits in the market is crucial. This means you need to focus on market research to assess industry trends, competitor positioning, and demand. Customer research is also key to identifying pain points and user stories to validate your product. 

The focus at this stage is on exploratory and qualitative analysis to refine the product before growth. If you’re working at a startup, check out our glossary that covers what you need to do as a Startup Product Manager. 

Product analysis when in the Growth Phase

As your product gains traction, the goal shifts to optimizing and scaling. The growth phase is all about refining your product-market fit and identifying areas ripe for expansion. During this stage, product analytics plays a vital role in helping you track performance, user adoption, and engagement.

Tracking these metrics reveals what drives user retention and uncovers areas of friction. Understanding where users are finding value and where they’re experiencing challenges will help you maintain momentum and fuel product-led growth.

Product analysis in the ongoing Product Management lifecycle

There are a few other stages in the Product Management lifecycle where product analysis becomes important

• Post-launch : After releasing a feature, it’s time to track performance and see if it’s delivering as expected. This is when you check if your assumptions hold true and whether users are engaging as planned.
• Feature optimization : When user feedback starts rolling in, it’s time to refine your features. You’ll want to optimize based on what’s working, what’s frustrating, and what needs more polish.
• User experience (UX) improvements : UX analysis is crucial for pinpointing pain points in the user journey. Are there bottlenecks or friction that are preventing users from reaching their goals smoothly? Addressing these will help you create a seamless experience.

How do you do product analysis well?

To do product analysis well, you’re going to want to follow a clear, step-by-step framework. Now, all product analysis looks different, depending on the techniques you use or the particular analysis you’re focusing on, but this guide below is built to allow you to plug in your chosen method and get to work.

Product analysis step-by-step guide

Step 1: Define your goals and hypothesis

Before diving into the data, clearly define your objectives. What are you hoping to learn? Once your goal is clear, develop a hypothesis around what you expect the data to reveal. 

For instance, you might hypothesize that adjusting your pricing model will increase acquisition. This hypothesis will act as the lens through which you review the findings of your product analysis, so it’s crucial to get it right.

Step 2: Choose the right tools and data

Next, it’s time to decide on the tools you’ll use and the types of data you need to collect. You’ll want a mix of both quantitative (like user behavior or feature usage) and qualitative data (like feedback from users or satisfaction surveys). Depending on your objectives, different tools are going to be needed. 

With your tools, you might need to track specific types of data, such as:

• Behavioral data: Tracks user interactions, like clicks, session lengths, and drop-offs.
• Customer feedback: Qualitative insights from surveys, reviews, and user testing to gauge satisfaction and identify pain points.
• Feature adoption: Understanding how users are adopting and interacting with new features can shed light on areas for improvement.
• Market data: Understanding the competitive landscape, consumer perception, trends, expectations, and more.

Step 3: Analyze the data

Once you’ve gathered the data, dig into the patterns, trends, and behaviors that emerge. This stage is not just about confirming your hypothesis but uncovering new insights. Examine the trends in what you found – are there patterns? 

Start asking the tough questions: What’s driving these trends? If they’re bad, what can you do to stop them?

Step 4: Test your hypothesis

Now it’s time to validate your assumptions through small experiments. This ensures you’re not making major changes based on guesses. 

Start with incremental tests. For example, if you think your product analysis will reveal that your pricing model isn’t right and you think a pricing change will boost sign-ups, try it on a small user segment first and measure the impact. A/B testing is a powerful tool here. By testing two variations of a feature or design, you can directly compare which one performs better under real-world conditions.

Step 5: Iterate and implement findings

After testing, it’s time to iterate. Refine your product based on what worked and what didn’t. Then get ready to do it all over again!

The key to realizing the benefits of effective product analysis is continuous improvement – you’re never really “done.” Even after a successful iteration, new rounds of testing or user feedback may reveal additional opportunities for refinement. Product analysis is an ongoing cycle, where each round builds upon the last, allowing you to keep adapting and improving your product.

Product analysis challenges and best practices

Product analysis isn’t easy. Here’s our list of things to watch out for that can impact your product analysis, and the best practices you can follow to combat them. 

Drowning in data: With endless dashboards, reports, and spreadsheets, it’s easy to get buried under a mountain of numbers.
– The fix: set clear objectives and focus on the metrics that actually drive decisions, not just the ones that look impressive in a meeting.

Navigating biases: Data might be objective, but humans? Not so much. Confirmation bias can lead teams to cherry-pick stats that support their existing beliefs.
– The fix: bring in diverse perspectives from your cross-functional teams, run peer reviews, and question assumptions before making big calls.

Losing sight of the user: If your product isn’t built for users, all the analysis in the world won’t fix it. 
– The fix: Prioritize user-centricity by regularly testing usability, running surveys, and feedback loops to ensure that customer needs drive decision-making – not just internal hunches.

Working in silos: If teams aren’t sharing insights, they’re making decisions in the dark. 
– The fix: Cross-functional collaboration to ensure that data isn’t just hoarded by one team but is used collectively to paint a full picture of product performance.

Stagnation from inaction: Insights aren’t worth much if they’re just sitting in a report. 
– The fix: Turn learnings into action, iterate on what works, and foster a culture where continuous improvement is the norm – not a one-off project.

Juggling competing priorities: When everything is urgent, nothing actually gets done. 
– The fix: Product teams need to define and defend their focus, using clear goals and strategic prioritization to cut through the noise and drive meaningful impact. Keep it simple and focus on what matters to avoid analysis paralysis.

Product analysis explained

Product analysis makes up a huge part of Product Management. It helps you learn about your product, discover ways to make it better, and improve the value proposition for your customers. 

This article should give you everything you need to know to perform product analysis yourself and discover potential possibilities with your product. 

Once you’ve completed product analysis, and validated the potential solutions and hypotheses created from it, you need a place to track your progress on these efforts. You need a product roadmap. 

In ProdPad you can track all your experiments, manage your process through discovery all the way to measure results and monitor the impact on your OKRs, and all centered around a Now-Next-Later roadmap that includes a view of ‘completed’ initiatives as a permanent record of your product changes and the impact they drove.

Give ProdPad a try for free today and see how the tool helps you effectively manage your ongoing product analysis and use it to make informed decisions.

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What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information, good or bad, that you receive about the quality of your products or services from the people paying money to use them.

Sometimes you’ll find it really easy to get feedback from customers – especially when you’re doing things badly. People are naturally more inclined to leave negative reviews than positive ones. In fact, people are 1.7 times more likely to give feedback following a bad experience than a ‘normal’ one.

So, if something’s really broken, you’ll probably already know about it thanks to some vocal, unhappy customers. 

But here’s the thing: collecting customer feedback that’s negitive is actually a golden opportunity. It’s ironclad proof that something isn’t working; it removes assumptions and shows you exactly what needs to change.

Why collecting customer feedback is so important?

Nobody likes criticism, so it’s tempting to steer clear of willingly soliciting negative feedback. But living in a bubble won’t help your product grow and evolve, and not listening to your customers is a surefire way to frustrate them. You may be passionate about your product, and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but you still need to be open to feedback to inform product decisions.

Besides, customers want to be heard, and they trust each other more than they trust you. SurveyMonkey found that some 91% of people feel that product innovation should come as a result of listening to customers, versus just 31% who think a team of in-house experts can achieve the same thing.

And you know what else? Any customer feedback you did manage to gather is a powerful indicator of the feedback you didn’t. A recent ThinkJar survey found that only one in 26 customers will voice their complaints; the rest will just up and leave without so much as a murmur, increasing customer churn.

That means that for every negative piece of customer feedback you manage to collect, 25 other people feel the same but have already moved on to a competitor, without telling you why. Talk about being ghosted. Working on the feedback you do have can help increase customer retention.

Oh, and another added bonus to sending out those survey questions: if customer feedback is filled with really positive experiences, then you can use what people write as testimonials, both on your site’s product page and in your social media activity.

How should you be collecting customer feedback online?

It’s never been easier to understand what people think about your products and services, and it’s never been more important to understand what your customer experience is really like. You need to know what people are thinking if you’re going to have an effective customer feedback strategy.

Here are the top 10 digitally-focussed ways to collect customer feedback:

1. In-app popups
2. in-app feedback widget
3. Customer feedback surveys
4. Customer feedback portal
5. Review sites
6. Live chat
7. Social media
8. Heatmaps
9. Product adoption analytics
10. Be easily contactable

1. In-app popups

If you have customers working within the confines of your tool, you have a captive audience that you can occasionally prod for feedback. A pop-up window in your product – perhaps set to appear after customers have been using it for a certain number of days – is an effective method for collecting customer feedback and can be used to ask them for many different types of responses.

You might ask for:

• Direct ratings out of five or ten
• Qualitative “tell us what you think” feedback
• Reviews on relevant app store pages
• A Customer Effort Score
• For them to give you a customer satisfaction score

Just remember not to bug people too much; with great power, comes great responsibility. You don’t want to end up getting bad feedback about how you collect customer feedback.

2. In-app widget

One top trick is to make it as easy as possible for your users to provide you with their feedback. By including an in-app button that your users can seamlessly use to tell you what they’re thinking, you make it more likely that they will. You can even encourage increased engagement by offering incentives to customers, and thanks to the added convenience you’ll be collecting more valuable and actionable feedback.

You’ll get real-time information about issues as soon as they occur, which means you can get on with fixing them sooner, and avoid more unhappy customers reporting the same issue.

So many tools out there can help you do this, but we recommend you try using ProdPad to collect your customer feedback. Our in-app widget works hand in hand with our customer feedback portal (more on those below), and together they’re seamless and convenient.

They’re also fully customizable. You can adjust them to fit your branding, increasing trust and credibility with your customers, and providing a more cohesive user experience. It’s a great way to see how well certain parts of your app feed into your overall understanding of your customer satisfaction levels. The widget’s also a smart replacement for live chat if you don’t have the staff to make that work.

3. Customer feedback surveys

There are loads of online survey providers out there, from paid services like SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to free resources like Google Forms. Most are incredibly customizable and easy to use, and they all collate feedback in one place for easy analysis – or let you export it into other formats.

Remember to keep surveys relatively short. Unless you’re offering an incentive like money off a subscription or a prize giveaway, customers will soon tire of filling out questions and are likely to stop answering with any care or accuracy if things drag on.

When collecting product feedback in this way, It’s a good idea to try mixing multiple-choice questions with a few longer-form open-ended question text fields, as well as asking the industry-standard NPS and CSAT questions.

Customer survey responses, whether you use a tool or send out a simple email survey, are a great way to get quantitative feedback and qualitative data about customer satisfaction. Perfect if you want to dig in right in and see how your customers really feel about your product.

You can invite users to complete surveys, interviews, and more by asking them through a customer feedback email. The way you put these together is going to influence how many responses you get, so you’re going to want to write them well.

We’ve put together 11 different customer feedback email templates to help you write the right one for each situation. Check it out to improve your customer feedback emails:

4. Customer feedback portal

Having a branded customer feedback portal on your website means your customers can come and ask for features they want and give customer opinions about the ones they’ve been using. This’ll give your product team a clear understanding of what the people who use your product want you to build next, and what needs fixing.

This is an invaluable way to get some good use out of the customer feedback you’re collecting, to close the customer feedback loop, and to make sure that you’re building things that will boost customer loyalty.

Using something like ProdPad means you’re not just housing a feedback form on your website. We already mentioned that ProdPad has a customizable feedback portal, but it’s more than just that. You’ll also be collecting those feature requests into a place that helps you to do something useful with them.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

5. Review sites

According to eMarketer, a Bizrate Insights survey showed that a massive 98% of buyers scour online reviews before making a purchase. Like, that’s pretty much everyone.

So, it’s important to know what those customer reviews are saying about you online. That way you can fix any common customer concerns and reply to any particularly aggrieved users. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made for replying to every single review you find, whether it’s good or bad.

The best way to keep on top of reviews on third-party sites is to employ a listening suite that can scour everything from reviews to tweets and aggregate them for you. The best customer experience management suites can collate this with feedback from any other source you can think of, and suggest actions and next steps.

If you work in SaaS in particular, you’ll be no stranger to sites like G2. Generating positive reviews there is a great way to get yourself some of those oh-so-recognizable badges. They’re a wonderful way to show that your product gets so much positive feedback that your customers love you enough to leave you a glowing review. 

6. Live chat

Live chat is a great way to answer customer questions and queries instantly, and it doesn’t require them to hang around on the phone because follow-up replies can happen throughout the day. Even better, live chat can also become a powerful feedback engine.

The end of every live chat is an opportunity to ask for the customer’s opinion for quick feedback – and not just about how their customer support query went. You can take the chance to ask them if they’d be willing to provide a quick review of your product or give insight into what they do or don’t like about it.

As with any method of collecting customer feedback, not everyone will bother. But if you automate the ask, you lose nothing and stand to gain a ton of valuable opinions.

7. Social media

According to Sprout Social, 47% of customers with a complaint to air will do so on social media. If almost half of your negative feedback is plastered over Facebook and Twitter, it pays to be on the lookout for it. Social listening tools (like Sprout Social) can do this for you, while also flagging priority messages that need to be actioned first.

But you can be proactive, too. Why not occasionally run polls in Tweets or Instagram Stories? Or explicitly ask people what they’d like to see in future updates? You’d be surprised how many great ideas and keen advisors there are out there.

The response rate on social media platforms is a real draw too: it’s virtually instantaneous and easy for your customers to leave. You’ll likely be amazed by how much information you gather, especially if you have a large audience on your social media channels. Just ask Wendy’s.

So remember – social media isn’t all eccentric billionaires and cats playing pianos. It’s actually a wonderful way to get direct feedback from an online community of super-engaged people!

8. Heatmaps

Heatmapping technology is a pretty technical way to understand how people are using your product, though it can also pick out any issues they might be facing with it – even ones they might not be able to articulate themselves.

By embedding tools like Smartlook into your product, you can get an aggregate view of customer behavior, be it how they’re scrolling, clicking, and navigating your pages. One valuable insight you’ll get from using a heat mapping tool is seeing something in the user flow that you might not have picked up before the feature went live,

For example, you might see that your users are rage-clicking in a particular place, or bouncing when you don’t expect them to. Then, when you look into it a bit further, you might realize that a pop-up is blocking the next action, or that your CTA copy is misleading.

The catch here is that you can’t see an individual customer journey, and understanding what it all means requires a bit of lateral thinking.

9. Product analytics

Like heatmap tools, product analytics suites are platforms that monitor usage across your entire product. They can track a whole heap of product adoption metrics with feature-level granularity, making them a passive method of collecting customer feedback that doesn’t bother the user for input.

Let’s say you’ve released a new feature in the latest version of your product. Product analytics suites can look at metrics like feature adoption rate, time-to-first-action, and active users, to help you figure out if that new tool is landing how you’d like.

Product analytics tools can be really comprehensive and give you real-time feedback, but they also suffer from the same major drawback as any analytics suite: you need someone who knows how to interpret data in order to derive actionable insight. After all, generating a bunch of stats around product adoption is great for morale, but what’s even better is the ability to learn as much from those metrics as you would from a piece of written feedback.

We’ve actually got a breakdown of the 7 best product analytics suites right here to save you the trouble of searching them down yourself.

10. Be easily contactable!

How many times have you had to dive several clicks deep into a website to find actual contact details for a company? It’s infuriating, right? So, don’t do that. Have multiple direct channels open for feedback.

The humble email is still an excellent way to garner feedback from  customers, so don’t make it difficult for them to reach you.

Have a good long think about how quick and easy it is for users to send you an email. Maybe there should be a button in plain sight somewhere in the product itself? Or perhaps an email link in the footer of your website?

We’d advise cutting down on the required form fields, and maybe even using a dropdown list for possible topics, which are then delivered to separate inboxes.

How should you be collecting customer feedback in person?

While we do of course live in a digital age, there’s no better way to be sure of getting some feedback than having your customers there in the room with you.

Here are some of the best ways to collect some direct user feedback:

1. Customer Interviews
2. Focus groups
3. Customer advisory board
4. User testing sessions

1. Customer Interviews

Interviews are a fantastic way to get deeper insights and qualitative feedback into what your customers are thinking and feeling about your product. Start by carefully choosing a diverse mix of users, ensuring you hear from different perspectives. Flexibility in scheduling and creating a comfortable environment (be it in-person or online) is important if you want to encourage people to engage.

You’ll need to have skilled interviewers who can steer the conversation effectively, ask open-ended questions, and really listen, encouraging interviewees to share detailed experiences and ideas. And after your one-on-one interviews, make sure to send a heartfelt “thank you” and follow up to close the customer feedback loop! It’s more than just good manners; it’s about showing appreciation for their valuable time and thoughts, and building an even more personal connection between them and your product.

Sometimes, you might want to ask follow-up questions for more clarity, but only if they’re comfortable with it. This follow-up can shed more light on the initial feedback, adding even more value to what you’ve learned. Either way, dive into the data from these interviews, looking for patterns, pain points, and other golden nuggets to build out your user stories. Then, it’s all about turning these insights into action.

2. Focus groups

In a similar vein to interviews, focus groups can be goldmines for getting diverse, in-depth customer feedback, by bringing together a small group of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to talk about your product. It’s fascinating how a mix of perspectives can shed light on things you might not have considered, like customer expectations and needs.

Again, make sure to have a skilled moderator to lead the discussion. They’re like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard and keeping the conversation flowing and on point.

Preparation is key to getting the most from the process. Set clear goals for what you want to learn from each group. It’s not just a casual chat; you’ll need to have specific topics and questions in mind to steer the conversation. But there’s always room for spontaneity – sometimes the most unexpected insights come from just letting the conversation take its own course.

Try to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere. You want your participants to open up, share their honest thoughts, and interact with each other. That’s where the magic happens – when people start bouncing ideas off each other, so it can help to use icebreakers to lighten the mood and get everyone talking.

3. Customer Advisory Board

Your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is like the Small Council from Game of Thrones, made up of your most engaged and influential customers from various customer segments. These members should be hand-picked for their diverse experiences and deep understanding of the market. The idea is to keep this group tight-knit, usually around 10-15 members, to foster meaningful discussions and easy management.

CAB meetings are like regular check-ins, usually happening every quarter or so. Again, you should always be clear about what you want to get out of these sessions – it could be anything from detailed feedback on a new feature to strategies for tackling market changes. The key is to have structured agendas but also leave room for open, candid conversations.

These sessions aren’t just about you talking at your customer base. It’s a two-way street, giving you space to dive into problem-solving, and tapping into the diverse expertise of your board members. Their unique perspectives often lead you to innovative solutions you might not have considered otherwise.

Post-meeting, don’t just pat yourself on the back and call it a day though. Follow up with a summary of what was discussed and the action points you plan to tackle. This follow-through is the whole point. It shows your CAB members that their input isn’t just valued, it’s instrumental. And, by implementing their feedback, you’re not just fine-tuning your product; you’re building a partnership with some of your most valuable customers.

4. User testing sessions

User testing sessions make for great reality checks. Bring in people who represent your actual users – you’ll want some that are already customers, and some that might be potential users. The goal is to see your product through their eyes.

It’s all about understanding how your product fits into their daily lives. By creating realistic scenarios for them to work through in a beta test, you get a window into how intuitive and user-friendly your product really is. After all, you probably know your product inside and out, which means you’re probably not a good judge of how new or less experienced users approach it.

Note where they stumble, what makes them pause, and when those wow moments crop up. It’s a fascinating process and can be super informative. Encourage them to think out loud as they navigate, giving you a peek into their thought process. This fresh, immediate feedback is gold – it’s raw and often points out things you might not have noticed with your burden of product knowledge.

Next, sift through it all, looking for patterns and key takeaways, then turn these into action points for your product team. It’s an ongoing cycle – test, learn, improve, and test again. And again we make sure to loop back with our participants, showing them how their input is shaping our product. It’s not just about finding flaws; it’s about constantly evolving and making our product the best it can be for those who use it.

What should you do next after collecting customer feedback?

Ok, so you’ve got ears and eyes all over collecting customer feedback, and you’re running feedback sessions and interviews. If what you’re hearing is positive, you proudly display what’s been said on your website as customer testimonials, and share it with your team as a morale boost. But… what if it’s negative?

Well, that’s when you act. Don’t get mad, get fixing! You need to take what people are saying and turn it into improvements where you make informed decisions that positively impact every customer – not just the ones giving feedback.

Let’s look at a few examples:

“I like what the product does but it’s too pricey for me in the long term.”

If this is a one-off criticism, you might be able to take it with a pinch of salt. But if this is coming from a handful of customers, you need to think about your product pricing strategy. Maybe you can offer a stripped-back freemium tier or a student rate. You could do worse than use this feedback as a jumping-off point to run a focus group on pricing.

“Too complicated. The app has way too much going on.”

You’ve got navigation issues. Sometimes what seems obvious to the team making the product seems alien and confusing to outsiders, and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. It would be worth combining this written feedback with some technical insight via eye-tracking software to see how people are navigating your app. Alongside this, why not workshop a more user-friendly set of tutorial screens, and look to improve your product onboarding?

“Crashes all the time.”

Red alert! Even one user claiming that your product is unstable should be enough to launch a full-scale QA investigation. If your product crashes regularly you need to find out what the variables are, and whether it’s a specific browser, chipset, or OS that’s rubbing up against your architecture the wrong way.

What’s crucial is that this becomes a cyclical process. You should be collecting customer feedback as often as humanly possible without it becoming a burden on your target audience.

The aim of the game is to collect feedback and opinions, act on what you learn, and then ask again. If you’re receiving fewer customer complaints about that issue, you can move on to a different priority on the product roadmap.

Developing a product is an infinitely long process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later.ong process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later. 

Top tips for collecting customer feedback

Finally, before we leave you to go listen really hard to your customers to find out exactly how to make them happy, here are a few final ideas to help you nail your feedback loop:

1. Timing is everything: Request feedback following all customer interactions or at relevant moments. Avoid times when it might be intrusive or irrelevant.
2. Incentivize responses: Offering rewards or incentives can help to increase response rates.
3. Target a diverse audience: Ensure you’re gathering feedback from a wide range of users to avoid biased insights. Consider different user types, demographics, and levels of engagement with your product.
4. Context is king: Choose the right medium (in-app, email, social media) based on the context and nature of the feedback you’re seeking.
5. Keep it short and simple: Lengthy surveys or complicated feedback mechanisms can deter users. Aim for clarity and brevity.
6. Acknowledge and act: Show users that their feedback is valued by acknowledging their contributions and, where feasible, implementing changes based on their input.
7. Continuous process: Regularly update your feedback mechanisms and keep the process ongoing, adapting to changes in user behavior and preferences.
8. Privacy and transparency: Assure users of their privacy and be transparent about how their feedback will be used.
9. Respond quickly to feedback: Reply swiftly to feedback, especially if it’s negative. This shows customers that their opinions are valued and taken seriously, and can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Learning from your customers

Collecting customer feedback is one of the best ways to understand how your product is performing and if it’s meeting the pain points of your users. So, go forth, intrepid feedback hoovers! 

Unleash the power of your newfound knowledge, engage with your customers in meaningful ways, and turn their customer complaints and praise into the golden keys that unlock the potential of your product.

And to manage all that juicy feedback, use ProdPad’s Feedback Management feature. Track all customer suggestions and use our innovative tool to find reoccurring, and highly valuable feedback to help you prioritize upcoming features and make better product decisions. 

Find out for yourself just how useful ProdPad’s Feedback Management is by playing around in our interactive Sandbox.

The post Collecting Customer Feedback in 2025 appeared first on ProdPad.

What is product benchmarking?

Product benchmarking is the practice of comparing your various product metrics against a set of standards to judge how well your product is performing. These standards are goals that you’ll want to at least match, and ideally exceed. Product benchmarking allows you to assess your product’s performance relative to industry norms.

A lot of the time, product benchmarking involves analyzing your product against your competitors, seeing how you shape up against others in your industry. You can also benchmark against industry norms, which are the average performance metrics that you can expect an everyday company in your industry to achieve.

Benchmarking helps you assess your product’s strengths and weaknesses and lets you see how you’re getting on compared to the rest of the field. It’s like comparing your grades to everyone else in your class. If the class average is a C+ and you’re getting an A, that means you’re one of the star pupils. Great.

The goal of product benchmarking is to find gaps and uncover opportunities to make sure your product stays competitive. Benchmarking is not a one-and-done task, it’s an ongoing process that allows you to make data-driven decisions about every aspect of your product, like product pricing strategies, the features you offer, and more. 

The two types of product benchmarking

There are two main types of product benchmarking, internal and external. 

• Internal benchmarking: Focuses on comparing your performance and outcomes against yourself, seeing how things have changed over a period of time. By comparing performance against yourself, you’ll be able to see what initiatives have worked and what needs to change to improve performance. 
  
• External benchmarking: This involves analyzing your product against competitors or a set of industry standards. This is where you find out how you stack up against the real world. This is useful when you want to assess your product positioning and find areas where competitors have the edge. 

Ideally, you’ll be using both types of product benchmarking to get a better sense of how you’re doing relative to your industry and to yourself. Focusing on your own product performance helps keep you grounded too. You always want to be a little bit better than yesterday. 

What are the benefits of product benchmarking? 

Product benchmarking is something you definitely should be doing as a Product Manager. There’s a whole range of benefits waiting for you each time you analyze your performance against industry or internal benchmarks. When you benchmark properly, here are some of the things you’ll be able to do: 

Prioritize with precision 

Benchmarking helps you focus on what truly matters by revealing where your product excels and where it stinks. It can confirm areas where you’re already leading the pack or highlight hidden opportunities for improvement. For instance, if your conversion rates are already stellar, you can shift attention to other areas like retention or scalability.

Uncover market trends and stay relevant

Regular benchmarking keeps you informed about market shifts and emerging trends. This helps you adapt your product to meet changing customer expectations, adopt new ideas that are gaining traction, and avoid clinging to outdated features that no longer serve your audience.

Foster continuous improvement

Benchmarking provides actionable insights to improve not only your product but also your processes. Whether it’s optimizing workflows or refining features, this data-driven approach supports ongoing innovation.

Enable data-backed decision-making

With insights from benchmarking, you can confidently prioritize updates, allocate resources, and plan roadmaps based on facts, not hunches. This facilitates data-driven Product Management which allows you to reduce the risk of investing in features or strategies that don’t deliver ROI. 

Set realistic goals

Aiming for the sky is admirable, but set your target too high and you’re just going to end up disappointed. Benchmarking gives you a sense of what’s achievable by showing you where top performers are in your market. This helps set practical yet ambitious goals for your product and team.

What metrics should you measure when product benchmarking? 

When benchmarking your product, the metrics you focus on will typically differ depending on your industry and the type of product you have. For example, a B2B SaaS tool will want to focus on different metrics than an entertainment platform.

That said, some metrics are just more important than others and will be ones that you’ll want to measure and compare against regardless of the industry you’re in. We’ve broken down the most common metrics to benchmark and explain why they matter and why everyone looks at them. 

1. Activation rate

Activation rate measures the percentage of users who complete a key action that signifies they’ve experienced your product’s core value proposition. Known as user activation, this is often the first major hurdle in the user journey. A strong activation rate indicates that your onboarding process and initial value delivery are working as intended.

By comparing your activation rate to that of competitors, you can evaluate whether your entry-point experience meets industry expectations and pinpoint areas for improvement if your rate lags behind.

2. Product stickiness

Product stickiness refers to how often users engage with your product, typically measured by the ratio of Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU). A sticky product is one that users find indispensable, making it a critical indicator of long-term engagement and user retention.

Benchmarking your product’s stickiness against competitors allows you to gauge whether users are engaging with your product on a regular basis, signaling that your product is meeting their day-to-day needs. If your stickiness is lower than competitors, it might point to areas where your product is failing to capture frequent usage or ongoing user interest.

3. Feature adoption rate

Feature adoption rate tracks the percentage of users who regularly use a specific feature out of the total number of active users. This metric helps you understand how well individual features resonate with your user base. When benchmarking feature adoption, comparing your rates to others in your space can highlight features that are underutilized and suggest opportunities to improve those features, making them more valuable and appealing.

If a particular feature has low adoption compared to industry standards, it could indicate usability issues or a lack of user education around its benefits, which you can address by creating a killer product tour to improve overall engagement.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking users how likely they are to recommend your product to others on a scale of 0 to 10. This score gives a broad picture of your product’s reputation and overall customer sentiment.

A high NPS compared to industry benchmarks can suggest that users are highly satisfied and willing to advocate for your product. On the other hand, a low score signals areas for improvement.

By benchmarking your NPS against the average standard in your industry, you can gain insights into where your product stands in terms of user loyalty and identify specific areas to focus on for boosting customer satisfaction.

5. Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate refers to the percentage of customers who stop using your product within a specific time frame. High churn is often a warning sign that your product may not be meeting users’ needs or that there are issues with user retention.

By comparing your churn rate to benchmarks, you can determine whether your retention efforts are on par with industry standards. If your churn rate is higher than average, it might suggest a need for improvements in user engagement, product-market fit, or customer support to keep users satisfied and reduce turnover.

6. Pirate Metrics (AARRR Framework)

The Pirate Metrics framework, encompassing Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AARRR), provides a comprehensive view of your product’s performance throughout the entire user lifecycle. Benchmarking each stage of the AARRR funnel helps you identify strengths and weaknesses across your product’s journey.

For instance, if your retention rate is lower than the benchmark, it might suggest that your users aren’t finding lasting value or engagement in your product. Understanding how each of these stages stacks up against the rest of the industry helps you focus on areas with the greatest impact on your overall performance, guiding you toward optimizing your product for long-term success.

While the above metrics are common benchmarks, the specifics will shift based on your industry:

• B2B SaaS: Should also focus on metrics like free-to-paid conversion rates, customer lifetime value (CLTV), and time-to-value. These reflect the subscription-based nature of the model and the importance of long-term customer relationships.
• B2C Products: Metrics like DAU, MAU, and user engagement are more critical, as these products typically rely on high-volume, frequent interactions to thrive.
• E-commerce: Metrics such as average order value, cart abandonment rate, and purchase frequency come into play.

By customizing your benchmarking efforts to your industry and target audience, you can ensure you’re tracking the metrics that matter most, providing insights that directly support your product strategy.

So you know what to measure, but what are the benchmarks you’re looking to beat? Well, Mind The Product has a pretty interesting benchmarking tool that gives details on the overall performance of these metrics for various industries. It’s worth checking out. 

Common product benchmarking mistakes you might be making

Alright, here’s the juicy bit. There are a lot of things at play that mean that you may not be getting the most out of your product benchmarking.

Have you ever done your product benchmarking and felt like crying because everything pales in comparison? Have you ever done your benchmarking, seen where you’re lagging behind, but have no idea how to improve it? If these are common experiences for you when undertaking product benchmarking, the good news is that we’re going to help set you straight and turn this comparison exercise into something truly valuable for you.

If product benchmarking isn’t doing it for you right now, here’s where you may be going wrong: 

You’re comparing against the wrong benchmarks

You need to find the most relevant benchmarks you can to get the most useful comparison. Don’t base your assessment on extremely broad benchmarks that haven’t drilled down into your niche. It’s important to do your research and try to find the most granular data you can. If your product is a B2B SaaS tool, don’t settle for benchmarks for all ‘digital products’.

If your product is an e-commerce platform and you want to assess your ‘time on page’ performance (for example), don’t base your comparison on a general benchmark, look for specific e-commerce website benchmarks. 

Otherwise, you run the risk of unfairly comparing your performance against products that will always have a stronger performance in some areas than you. For example, if you are managing an e-commerce site as your product, you don’t want to be assessing your performance based on benchmarks for, say, returning traffic, which also include tools like email platforms. People are in their emails every day – you can’t compete with that! And nor should you. You need to be looking at benchmarks for returning traffic that are specific to the e-commerce industry.

You’ll also hit issues if you’re trying to conduct your product benchmarking against specific products rather than general industry data.  And that’s because it’s only the super mega-successful companies that are openly sharing their performance metrics! 

It’s a lot easier to gather information from the likes of Google, Slack, and Dropbox, as they are proud of what they’ve achieved and want to boast. These companies often share eye-popping metrics that seem like the gold standard. But here’s the issue: their performance isn’t typical – it’s exceptional. These companies operate on a scale, budget, and level of maturity that most businesses can’t match.

The issue here is that measuring up against these companies means that you end up comparing yourself against the top 1%. Setting your product benchmarking against ultra-successful companies leads to unrealistic expectations. It’s like comparing your weekend jog to an Olympian marathon runner – it sets you up for disappointment and skews your understanding of where you really stand.

It’s fine to aspire to these performance results and try and learn from these companies that are killing it, but it’s not fair to assess your performance against them right now.

The fix: Use benchmarks relevant to your industry and based on aggregate data across the broad spectrum of products in the space.  

It’s like boxing, a Heavyweight can’t fight a Featherweight as it’s an unfair matchup. This “weight class” approach ensures the comparison is fair and actionable. You’ll gain insights that are actually relevant to your business. 

You’re measuring against unreliable data

So you want to benchmark against competitors, but that creates another issue. Unlike big players that often flaunt their success, most companies keep their performance metrics close to their chest. I imagine you’re not posting every minute detail about your Q3 performance, so don’t expect your competitors to do the same.

This means that you have to rely on industry reports that provide an average across a specific market – that’s what benchmarks are after all. Although useful, you need to be mindful that this only provides a snapshot, and may not be as nuanced as you’d ideally like. Plus, these reports are usually released annually, meaning that you end up benchmarking against outdated statistics.

All this can lead you to draw wrong conclusions about your product performance.

The fix: Combine external benchmarks with internal data. If you’re struggling to establish a baseline, draw on your own performance metrics to establish what you need to do and where you need to be going. This can help you supplement the industry benchmarks you may already know. 

You’re focusing on vanity metrics 

Some metrics are great for stoking your ego but don’t really tell you the true health and performance of your product. They may look impressive at first, but may not give you any actionable insights to help you improve things.

For example, having a huge number of overall app downloads might look cool, but it means nothing if your activation and retention rate is abysmal. By skimming this surface-level insight, you risk ignoring more useful metrics about your product’s actual performance.

The fix: Shift your attention from vanity metrics to actionable metrics tied to product outcomes. Things like activation and feature adoption give you more of a clue on whether users find your product valuable. With these detailed metrics as part of your product benchmarking, you’ll know what you need to focus on to improve. 

You’re looking at lagging metrics

Product benchmarking metrics can either look backward or point forward. Metrics like churn rate or revenue often reflect outcomes from decisions made weeks or months ago. While important, they’re backward-looking indicators that tell you what happened, not what’s happening now or what’s likely to happen in the future.

Lagging metrics don’t give you the foresight to make proactive changes. By the time you identify a problem, the damage might already be done. For example, noticing a spike in churn after months of decline means you’re reacting to a crisis instead of preventing it.

The fix: Focus on leading metrics when product benchmarking. These are statistics that by improving them, you’re sure to drive growth. metrics such as activation rate, feature engagement, or product stickiness, provide early signals of potential success or failure. Use these to stay ahead of problems and respond to trends before they snowball into larger issues. 

Your product benchmarking metrics don’t tell you how to improve

All metrics paint a picture and let you know how you’re performing, but when benchmarking your product, you want to isolate metrics that give you insight into where you need to improve. For example, say you’re benchmarking ARR and see that you’re pretty far behind the industry standard. It’s useful to know that you’re behind, but now you’ll be scratching your head trying to figure out why.

It’s like comparing your 100m sprint time to 2024 Olympic Champion Noah Lyles. You can see that your time of 15s (we’re being generous here) against his 9.78s is worse, but why? This metric doesn’t tell where to improve. Is it because he’s got a longer stride? A quicker reaction time off the blocks? Has better lung capacity? You just don’t know where to start to make the biggest improvements. This could lead to you focusing on improving something that gives you marginal gains.

Say you find out that your reaction time off the block is actually comparable to Noah’s, but it’s your stride length that’s letting you down. You’ll get bigger gains by focusing on what’s worse. This is the same thing you need to do with your product – look at metrics that shine a light on the best areas to improve so that you can allocate resources well and efficiently to improve performance.

The fix: Every metric you track in product benchmarking should have a clear purpose, and make it clear what aspect of your product you need to work on. Tracking monthly recurring revenue tells you nothing – but tracking your Customer Retention Rate tells you whether users are sticking around long enough to generate that revenue, and this can give a better indication of what you must do to improve it. 

So, how do you measure up?

Not getting the most out of your product benchmarking? Well, hopefully with this overview and advice on how to fix common mistakes, you’ll be able to compare better and see how you match up. Benchmarking is more than just seeing how you’re doing against others; the focus should be on learning where you should look to improve to make gains and stay competitive.

Product benchmarking is a tool to drive product growth and to make you more successful, so be sure to utilize these tips to take your product benchmarking to the next level.

And if you’re keen to improve your entire Product Management process, why not give ProdPad a try? Our tools help PMs implement best practices into their everyday workflow, helping you to manage roadmaps, tie customer feedback to ideas, and a hell of a lot more. Plus, we’re benchmarking pretty well against other Product Management tools .

But don’t just take our word for it word for it, why not see for yourself. Schedule a demo with one of our product experts and see what ProdPad can do for you.

The post Product Benchmarking: How to Do It Right to Improve Your Product Performance appeared first on ProdPad.

How do you define a North Star metric? 

A North Star metric is essentially the single metric that every team in your entire company strives to achieve. It’s a customer-focused metric and should be one that if you hit it, you’ll be able to drive revenue growth and product success. It’s the key measurement that guides a company’s product strategy by clearly connecting customer value to business growth. This vital metric helps align Product Teams and more around a common goal, ensuring that efforts are focused on what truly matters for long-term success and avoiding the pitfalls of dangerous vanity metrics.

Got it? If not, we have a deep and detailed glossary article on North Star metrics that covers EVERYTHING you need to know about them. Check it out if you want to learn more, like why it’s important, how to set one for your own product, and how to properly measure it.

How do you choose your North Star metric? 

Not to catch you out, but if you’ve read our North Star metric glossary article, you’ll already know how to set this key metric. Seriously, we have a whole dang infographic on that. 

Keeping things light here, the most important thing you need to know is that choosing a North Star metric boils down to defining a metric that connects customer value to business growth. If it sounds like we’re repeating ourselves, that’s ‘cause we are! Your North Star metric revolves around this idea, so it’s worth saying twice. 

There are many questions you can ask yourself to help you land on the perfect North Star metric example for you, but it really all simmers down to these three must-haves: 

1. Has to reflect customer value: Your North Star needs to capture the essence of what users value most about the product. That’s why many North Star metric examples are related to user activation, tracking the occurrence of the vital customer action that gets them hooked. 

2. Has to be measurable: There’s little point having a North Star metric that you can’t measure in your product data. It needs to be something tangible and quantitative. Sure, improving customer satisfaction is a good goal to have, but it’s harder to measure reliably than something based on their actual use of your product. So better to choose a weekly usage statistic as your North Star and use that as an indicator of customer satisfaction.  

3. Has to focus on long-term success: Rather than focusing on short-term gains, the best North Star metric examples signal ongoing engagement and loyalty. You’re tracking this metric for the long haul for sustainable growth, it’s not a short-term hyperfixation for a specified length of time. 

North Star metric examples for different types of products

Now it’s time to get into what you came for – some real-world North Star metric examples. Getting a sense of what successful businesses choose for their North Star can help you figure out the best one for you. 

That said, there is one important rule: don’t copy these North Star metric examples word for word. Doing so won’t make you magically have a good one yourself. That’s because North Star metrics are super personal. They relate heavily to each individual business. Your North Star needs to relate to your product vision, not someone else’s.

Now that you’ve been warned not to copy someone else’s homework, let’s take a look. We’ve broken things up into different product types to help you understand how the market and types of customers affect your overall product goals. 

Business software

Hey look, that’s us! If we’re going to be analyzing North Star metric examples, we may as well start with us. Our North Star is all about customer retention, tracking Net MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) to ensure that what we’re doing entices users to stick around. And to pat ourselves on the back a bit, we’re doing a good job at that. 

We love our North Star metric because of how it aligns all our teams to this customer-driven focus. It ensures that everyone in the product trio, plus Customer Success, Sales, and even Marketing is driven to provide great value in everything we do – be it a new feature release, product improvements, or customer support. 

We want our users to be lifelong advocates of ProdPad. Kind of like a fan of a band from the 90s who’s still listening to their music 30 years later. This should be a goal of any form of B2B SaaS, as these types of products thrive on sustained usage, making a metric focused on MRR a good option. It shows that customers are finding continuous value with the product. 

But enough about us, what are some other good North Star metric examples for business software? Some things you can track include:

• Feature engagement percentage: This measures how deeply users interact with key features, highlighting whether customers find real utility in the SaaS tool. For instance, if 70% of users are actively using a new feature, it’s a sign the feature hits the mark, and that customers are seeing the value in what you’re providing.
• Customer lifetime value (LTV): Tracking customer lifetime value allows SaaS businesses to understand the total revenue a customer generates throughout their relationship. This metric emphasizes the importance of retaining customers and enhancing the customer experience.

E-commerce

If we’re going to be talking about e-commerce, we can’t look beyond Amazon, the leading e-commerce business in the world – by a long shot. Amazon keeps an eye on purchases per month as their North Star metric. 

This is a solid North Star metric example as it relates to the core action of an e-commerce product – buying products – but also gives them a glimpse into customer satisfaction. If users are increasing their purchases, then their satisfaction is clearly not on a downward trajectory.  

Of course, Amazon tracks a lot of other key performance indicators alongside their North Star metric, and that’s something you should be doing too. 

Remember, your North Star metric isn’t a replacement for tracking others KPIs, it’s just the one you care about the most – like a favorite child. In fact, you should track related KPIs that give your North Star some more context. For Amazon, they track things like average delivery times, the number of returned items, and more, which are all focused on their core mission – to be the most customer-centric business in the world.

As an e-commerce business, your goal for growth is to get users to continue buying from you time and time again. To that end, here are a couple more North Star metric examples you can focus on if you don’t vibe with Amazon’s:

• Returning customer rate: Tracking your returning customer rate is an insightful North Star metric for e-commerce products as it signals longterm customer loyalty and satisfaction. High returning customer rates shows that users enjoy the e-commerce experience and trust the brand, leading to predictable revenue growth. 
• Average order value (AOV): AOV measures the average amount spent per transaction. Increasing this metric can indicate successful upselling or cross-selling strategies and helps gauge the effectiveness of promotions or product bundling. Higher AOV also directly impacts revenue without needing to get more customers.

Communication tools

Zoom’s North Star metric is a powerful example fora communication tool, as it highlights the importance of identifying actions that reflect genuine user engagement. For Zoom, the focus on frequency – tracking the number of critical actions, like meetings or calls per week- enables them to gauge both product stickiness and user reliance. This is particularly important when you have a communication product, where long-term growth often hinges on consistent, habitual usage rather than occasional or one-time interactions.

Frequency-focused metrics like Zoom’s help track sustained engagement and user retention. By honing in on weekly active usage, Zoom captures a real-time snapshot of customer loyalty and satisfaction, which is crucial for adapting and responding to market needs. This also supports data driven Product Management: if the frequency drops, it could indicate a need for new features, improvements, or more effective customer support.

Additionally, Zoom’s approach aligns with the trend of Product-Led Growth (PLG), where the product itself drives user acquisition and retention. A frequency-based metric allows Zoom to pinpoint precisely how often users find value in their platform, shaping their growth strategies around improving those moments.

Some other great communication-focused North Star metrics include:

• Time spent in meetings/calls: Tracking the total time users spend in meetings or calls gives you insight into how well your product is meeting customer needs. A longer average suggests that users rely on your product for in-depth discussions or prolonged interactions, indicating strong engagement and utility.
• Time to value (TTV): Time to value tracks the time it takes for a new user to experience the product’s wow moment. Reducing TTV is critical for improving user onboarding and increasing conversion rates, as quicker value realization encourages users to engage more deeply with the product.

Collaboration tools

The value of collaboration products comes from users having other active teams to interact and work with. If that number is below your benchmark, they may not be getting the most value out of the product. That’s why tracking daily active users is such a useful North Star metric for Slack. It directly correlates to its goal of being an everyday utility for teams. 

DAUs reflect engagement and reliability, showing how much teams depend on Slack for their workflows. By improving DAUs, Slack measures how effectively they make work-life easier and more connected, a critical element for a productivity tool aiming to boost collaboration.

Of course, there are other metrics collaboration tools can follow, such as:

• Daily messages sent per user: This product adoption metric measures how many messages each user sends daily, reflecting individual engagement levels. A higher average indicates that users are actively utilizing the platform for communication, which suggests that the tool is integral to their daily workflows.
• Average response time to messages: Measuring the average response time to messages can indicate how quickly users are communicating. A shorter response time suggests that the platform facilitates prompt interactions, which is crucial for effective collaboration and maintaining productivity.

Entertainment and media

Entertainment and media products will have slightly different North Star metric examples, more focused on total usage. Your goal is to keep users engaged with your product and to increase screen time, so Netflix’s North Star of total hours viewed is a great example. It’s a direct reflection of engagement. When people spend more time watching, it indicates they find value in the content. Hours viewed shows that users are not only engaging with Netflix but enjoying it enough to stay. This metric is ideal for Netflix, as it directly ties into their goal of being the go-to entertainment platform.

If your product is focused on written content, like Medium, you can augment this metric into something like ‘minutes spent reading per week.’ There are actually quite a lot of potential North Star metric examples that will work for media products. A few more include:

• Subscriber growth rate: Many media products use a subscription-based product pricing strategy, so tracking the growth rate of subscribers provides insight into the company’s ability to attract and retain paying customers. A consistent growth rate indicates strong demand for the content offered and effective marketing strategies.
• Content completion rate: This metric measures the percentage of viewers who finish watching or reading a piece of content, such as a movie, episode, or blog. A high completion rate indicates that the content is engaging enough to keep viewers interested from start to finish, which can inform product production decisions.

Hospitality and travel

For hospitality and travel products, things are a bit more unique. These apps must cater to users who are frequently on the move, seeking seamless, personal experiences that enhance their journey. They demand intuitive interfaces, quick access to essential information, and features that cater to both planning and in-the-moment needs. Ensuring high user engagement, a smooth user interface, and strong retention is key to making every interaction feel valuable to the customer.

Tracking the number of nights booked is crucial for hospitality and travel products like Airbnb because it captures the platform’s effectiveness in meeting the needs of both sides of its marketplace: travelers and hosts. Each booking reflects not just the platform’s reach but its reliability and value, creating a direct link between user satisfaction and business growth. 

Each night booked serves as a tangible indicator of entire marketplace trust. For travelers, it shows they trust the platform to offer secure, enjoyable, and unique accommodations. For hosts, it reflects trust in Airbnb’s ability to connect them with reliable guests. This trust is essential to Airbnb’s brand and long-term sustainability.

It also provides a good customer feedback loop. Nights booked offers a metric that reflects the overall user experience. High booking rates imply that users find value in the offerings, feel that the interface is intuitive, and trust the payment and communication systems. Tracking this metric can inform Airbnb of areas where experience can be further enhanced or optimized. 

Of course, there are more things you can check out when looking for a North Star metric example for a hospitality and travel product. Other important metrics that can become your North Star include:

• Booking conversion rate: This tracks how many users go from browsing to booking, reflecting the product’s ability to convert interest into action. It’s a crucial North Star metric because it directly measures the app’s effectiveness in turning potential interest into actual revenue. A high conversion rate suggests that the app is successfully engaging users, providing relevant options, and simplifying the decision-making process. 
• Time from search to booking:  Shorter times suggest a smooth user experience, an intuitive interface, and successful personalization and recommendations, encouraging users to act quickly. A shorter booking time often means users aren’t facing barriers or confusion, which is key in travel where decisions may need to be quick and convenient. 

Bad North Star metric examples

To help you create your North Star metric, it’s not enough to just see the best-in-class examples. It’s also worthwhile to see some bad ones so you know what to stay away from. 

Now we’re not going to be cruel and highlight any real examples because we don’t want to pick on anyone. That’s not nice. Instead, here are some generic creations that you might see and why they suck. 

If you’re reading these and notice a stark resemblance to your North Star metric, I don’t know what to tell you. You know what you need to do. These are the kinds of things you want to avoid. 

Number of sign-ups 

This is a pretty poor North Star metric as it only tracks the acquisition stage of the customer journey. This metric tells you next to nothing about how they’re using the product, and if they’re getting value from it. 

Users may sign up and never return, making this an unreliable measure of how well your product is doing. Something better may involve tracking active users. 

Number of free trial users

Oh boy, tracking something like this is a bad move. Yeah, free trials indicate the interest people have in your product, but again, it doesn’t let you see if users are finding the value in your product. And remember, it’s that value that drives success. 

You may see a huge uptick in trials and think, great, people love our product, but that can be explained by a good marketing strategy or offers, not because your product rules. This metric doesn’t highlight long-term customer retention or engagement, which are crucial for growth.

Any vanity metric

To be honest, if you’re using vanity metrics as your North Star, you’re completely missing the mark. Website visitors, app downloads, and even feature usage counts won’t work because they fail to measure product value. These metrics are as hollow as a balloon. They can paint a rosy picture, but won’t inform you if your product is solving customer problems. 

North Star metric examples – your role models

Your North Star metric serves as your torch in the dark. It shines a light on your product to help you align your strategies around a common goal and drive meaningful growth. This metric encapsulates what success looks like for an organization, focusing on user engagement, satisfaction, and long-term value. While it’s essential to look at industry-specific North Star metric examples for inspiration, it’s crucial to remember that these should serve as role models rather than exact blueprints.

Every business is unique, with its own goals, customer base, and challenges. Adopting a North Star metric that directly reflects your specific objectives will ensure that it resonates with your team and truly drives your success. Use these examples to ignite your creativity and spark new ideas, but tailor your metrics to suit your organization’s needs.

Define your North Star and let it guide your roadmap. If you’re ready to elevate the way you use product roadmaps, give ProdPad a try. Our free trial shows you how ProdPad streamlines planning, helps prioritize what truly matters, and keeps your entire team aligned with your North Star metric – all so you can build better products with confidence.

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Why use user onboarding software?

We don’t need to tell you the importance of nailing your product onboarding, right? If you don’t help your first-time users quickly and easily understand your product – what it does, how to use it and why it will be valuable to them – they won’t continue to use it, adopt it or pay for it. Your product will fail. 

So we’re agreed that it’s crucial to guide your users through their first use of your product and give them a specific onboarding experience to ensure they come back for more. But why do you need to use a user onboarding software tool for this job? Why is it better to add a tool to your stack for this, rather than just building your own product tours and onboarding flows directly into your own product? 

There are a couple of pretty compelling reasons.

You have full control

Using user boarding software for your product tours and onboarding flows will give you, as a Product Manager, far greater control. These no-code solutions mean you can just jump into the tool and create your flows, add your copy and make all the tweaks you want to, when you want to, without having to beg, borrow or steal time from your developers.

You can move faster

You can also move a lot faster because you won’t have to rely on any help from developers. 

If you choose to build your own onboarding flows and product tours directly into your product, you’ll need to factor that into your development planning. That will likely mean you need to add that to your product roadmap and prioritize the work amongst everything else. 

Whereas if you use a ready-made tool for this job, then you can just get on with it yourself and you won’t need to disturb the product roadmap. You can get this initiative up and running concurrently to the other initiatives on your roadmap. 

So, you can move faster AND avoid impacting the rest of the product development you want to do.

What is user boarding software?

Regardless of whether you use these tools in your own product yet or not, you will have experienced the work of these tools yourself when you’ve first signed up for a new app. Those tool tips, modals, pop-ups and notifications that guide through and show you how to use the product – that’s user onboarding software in action.  

User onboarding software is the behind-the-scenes toolkit that creates and powers these smooth, helpful experiences for new users.

These tools are typically SaaS products that provide you with a low to no-code way of creating these onboarding flows and integrating them into your product.

What should you look for in user onboarding software?

There are a lot of user onboarding software tools on the market right now and it can be hard to work out which ones are worth evaluating. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to give you a shortlist to pick. But what are the fundamental features and functionality you should expect from a user onboarding software tool? Let us walk you through the key things you should be looking for in a decent product tour tool.

No-code necessary

The beauty of using user onboarding software rather than building your product tours directly into your product is the ability it affords you as the Product Manager to crack on with it yourself. As we’ve already said, it means you can get in-app tours up and running without having to plan it into your development sprints and patiently wait until it gets prioritized. 

All the tools we’re recommending on this list allow you to build and publish your flows from their own UIs. All you’ll need to do is add a one-time script to your product and then you can create, tweak and publish to your heart’s content.

Analytics to measure performance

The whole point of creating these product tours is to guide as many new users as possible through certain activation tasks and valuable actions. So you need your user onboarding software to tell you how successfully that is being achieved. 

You need to use a product tour tool with a robust analytics suite that will allow you to see things like views and completion rates for complete flows, as well as individual steps. Ideally you would also be able to filter the analytics by different user segments so you can drill down further. 

Analytics for individual sessions can also be useful, providing details of the events and the timings so you can form a picture of how your users are moving through the flow step by step. 

Customizable branding & design

You need to be able to customize the appearance of the pop-ups, tool tips and guidance notes that appear for your users so your tours are blended into the overall app experience and don’t feel jarring. It’s important that these tours feel part of a consistent experience and not a bolted-on addition. 

All of the tools on our list have robust out-of-the-box design customization that should allow you to pick your font, colors and more. Some of these user onboarding software tools also offer custom CSS so you can tweak the appearance of any of the tour elements even further, should you need to. 

Integrations

You should consider the integrations you might need when it comes to your user onboarding software. You’ll want to push data into your chosen tool to help improve the targeting of your product tours, and you’ll likely want to push data out to communicate and measure results and to help inform other experiences across other channels. 

So, think about the rest of your tech stack – what integrations would you ideally need? And would you be happy with using something like Zapier to connect the apps, or would a native integration be better? 

Consider the following integrations when selecting your user boarding software:

• Your product analytics tool
• Your CRM
• Calendar tool to book demos or onboarding calls
• Your Live chat tool

Triggers and targeting options

At a basic level you’ll need to be able to set the triggers for when your product tours pop up. That could be a particular page in your app, or it could be based on a particular action a user has taken. You’ll need some level of control on when the product tour first fires so you can be sure it comes in at the right time. 

Some of the user onboarding software tools on our list will allow you to get more sophisticated with your triggers and enable you to segment your users and show different flows to different cohorts. 

Templates to get you started

It’s always helpful to see examples to help kick-start your thinking, so consider whether you’d ideally like your chosen user onboarding software to come with some ready-made template onboarding flows that you can pick up and adapt. They’re a great way to get started and can help you move that bit faster.

A/B testing and experimentation

You’re a Product Manager, so experimentation is in your blood! You’ll want a tool that will allow you to test different flows and measure the results so you can learn and iterate. If this sounds like something you’d want, be sure to double check your chosen tool has the ability to A/B test flows at least.

Common features of user boarding software

Here’s a quick checklist of features you’d typically expect to have in a good user onboarding software tool. 

• Product tours
• Checklists
• Announcements – banners, modals
• Surveys
• Hotspots
• Tooltips
• Analytics
• Segmentation and targeting 

Now you understand the lay of the land when it comes to user onboarding software, let’s dive into our list of the best 9 solutions on the market right now.

The Best User Onboarding Software

In no particular order…

1. Chameleon

Chameleon is a fairly extensive user onboarding tool offering all of the features listed above. They have product tours, tooltips, surveys, widgets, modals, banners and checklists. 

Chameleon also recently launched a universal search bar facility, which is pretty interesting.  It’s called Helpbar.ai. You can connect it to your help center and use it to offer your users the ability to search within your content and to get AI answers to their questions. 

There’s a cool way to try this out. Just add your help center URL into their website and you can instantly use the search functionality to get an AI generated answer to any question. Check it out for yourself. 

They also have a great Inspiration Gallery on their website that showcases a whole bunch of in-product guidance examples including tooltips, onboarding flows, upsell modals and more.

Pricing

Chamelon offers three pricing tiers, from Startup to Enterprise. The cost ranges depending on your product’s userbase. For 2000 monthly users, the Startup tier is priced at $279 a month. A nice bonus is that The HelpBar functionality of Chamelon is free is to use. Find more details on their pricing here. 

2. Appcues

Appcues are one of the major players in the user onboarding software game, with some big SaaS customers using them like AdRoll, ProfitWell and Vidyard. 

Appcues have one of the largest selection of integrations – 28 of which are native. Also, kudos to them on the integrations page on their website – thats some really nice web and UX design right there!

If you’re looking for a product tour tool that will work across both desktop and mobile and/or on mobile native applications, then Appcues should be one of your front runners. They have a particular focus on mobile with the Appcues Mobile tool. 

They also offer AI-powered localization that will deliver your onboarding flows in each user’s local language. So no matter what language you use in your product, you can deliver that all-important guidance and tutorial content in the user’s own language.

Pricing

The cost of Appcues scales depending on your average monthly user base. For 2500 monthly active users, Appcues Essentials plan will cost $249 a month, while their Growth tier costs $879 a month for the same monthly users. There’s also an Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Find out more on their pricing here.

3. Userpilot

Userpilot comes with an analytics tool that goes beyond the engagement with your product tours, so you can use this tool as your overall product analytics tool. Userpilot also has event auto-capture, allowing you to create all your tracking events without needing developers’ involvement.

The analytics for the user onboarding flows in Userpilot also offers the ability to set what they call ‘growth goals’ which you can use to measure your ongoing success rate. For example, you could set a goal of achieving 300 demo bookings with a particular product tour and the grow goals feature will track progress against that goal and surface an easy-to-understand goal report. 

Pricing

Userpilot offers three plans, a Starter, Growth, and Enterpirse tier. Their cheapest plan starts at $249 a month, with their Growth tier costing $749 a month when paid annually. If you’re looking for a pay monthly option, their Starter plan increases to $299 a month. Get the full breakdown of Userpilot pricing here.

4. Product Fruits

From a team based in the Czech Republic, Product Fruits specializes in AI generated product tour content. So if you’re not sure where to start or want to get off the ground particularly quickly, this could be a good way to spin up something as an initial test. 

These guys also allow you to deploy their snippet via Google Tag Manager, so you can get setup and have user tours published to your product without needing to bother your dev team at all.

Pricing

Product Fruits offer three tiers from ‘Core’ to Enterprise. Their lowest package starts at $79 a month for up to 1500 users. They define users as unique, active monthly users. Find more details on their pricing here.

5. UserGuiding

The folks at UserGuiding claim you can get completely set up and running in just 15 minutes. UserGuiding positions itself as the easiest of the user onboarding software tools, with the simplest implementation. 

Interestingly, you actually build your tours through their Chrome extension. This allows you to create and test the tours on top of your product right away, in real time. 

Pricing

UserGuiding offers three different options, a Basic, Professional, and Corporate Plan. The basic plan starts at $89 a month, with the Pro plan costing $249 a month based on a product with 2500 monthly active users. For their Corporate Plan, get in touch directly to get a quote. All the details of UserGuiding’s pricing can be found here.

6. Userflow

Userflow claim that their script has a 5 – 10x smaller footprint than their competitors. This could be a deciding factor for you if you’re concerned about the impact of these user onboarding software scripts on the speed of your app.  

Userflow also allow you to run multiple environments, meaning you can build and test your onboarding flows on your staging environment first before replicating on production. This means you can have one Userflow account and publish to more than one place.

Pricing

Userflow pricing starts at $240 a month for their Startup plan, designed for products with less than 10,000 monthly active users. To access their Pro plan, pricing starts at $680 a month, but scales up based on your overall active users. Find more details on their pricing here.

7. Whatfix

Whatfix, as a user onboarding software, goes a little further than some of the other tools on this list. Whatfix has three core areas to its product. Alongside their ‘digital adoption platform’, they also have a product analytics tool and something called Whatfix Mirror. 

Their Mirror tool is a simulated web application package that lets you create replicas of your web app to use like a sandbox environment for hands-on user training. Pretty cool right? This means, you can spin up a replica of your app without needing to borrow development time to do it. 

Within their user onboarding software tool they have a nice feature which allows you to export any of the content or tours you’ve created as videos, slide decks, how-to articles and PDFs. This is a great feature for helping you to scale your training materials quickly and easily. So every time you create a new product tour, you can spin it out into a whole range of different materials which your CS teams, Sales people and even Marketing can use as content.

Pricing

Whatfix offers three different plans, their Standard, Premium, and Enterprise tiers. In terms of pricing, you’re going to have to ask them directly. You can find out more about what each tier offers and request pricing information here.

8. Intercom

Intercom is first and foremost a Customer Service tool. You might even use it in your company to run your Help Center, live chat and Support tickets. But did you know they also offer a user onboarding tool? 

Needless to say, their product tours integrate seamlessly with the other elements of Intercom including their live chat interface. This means that you can surface relevant product tours to customers when they ask specific questions in the chat window. So, if a user hops into the chat to ask how to use a particular feature, rather than surfacing a help article on it, the chatbot can surface a link directly to the product tour for that feature. Neat hey? 

So if you’re already using Intercom as your Support tool, it could be well worth taking a look at their product tour functionality before you start evaluating brand new tools.

Pricing

Intercom starts at $39 per seat per month for their Essential plan, and rises to $139 per seat per month for the Expert plan. You can also choose to add on Proactive Support Plus for $99 a month to get advanced in-app and outbound support. Learn more about Intercom pricing here.

9. Hopscotch

Hopscotch doesn’t restrict the number of product tours you can create, no matter what pricing tier you are on, which is a nice touch. They also offer discounts for early-stage startups.

With Hopscotch, you can create your own tour templates, making it easier to create more and more tours and have other people on your team build experiences for your users. 

However, if you need to run your tours across both desktop and mobile, Hopscotch won’t be the tool for you as they don’t currently support mobile applications. 

Pricing

Hopscotch keeps things simple, offering a single plan that you can choose to pay monthly or annually. When paid annually, it’ll cost you $6.67 a month, or $79.99 for the year. Their pay monthly plan costs $9.99. Learn more about their pricing here. 

That concludes our list of the best user onboarding software tools. You should find a tool that works for you in terms of both functionality and budget from that lot. For the record, here at ProdPad we use Userflow. If you want to see that tool in action, why not start a free trial of ProdPad and take a look at our onboarding flows. We’d love to know what you think!

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