How to build great product experiences that drive growth

For digital companies, most user interactions take place within the product. That’s a large part of why so many companies have focused on product-led growth in recent years. 

It’s also why companies spend so much time and resources optimizing the product experience: The product is often your customer’s main point of contact with your organization. A stellar customer service team and hyper-personalized, relevant marketing won’t compensate for a bad product experience. 

Let’s talk about what makes a product experience exceptional, how to spot and solve common challenges, and what to measure to optimize your product experience. 

Product experience is the complete journey of the user within a product, including their initial discovery, onboarding, and value realization. 

It’s easy to confuse user experience, product experience, and customer experience, so let’s break it down.

Product experience can make or break a business. In some ways, that’s obvious: If you bought a pair of boots and they started leaking the first time it rained, leaving you with wet feet and disappointment, you probably wouldn’t buy from that company again? But a boot company can offer a great in-store experience and make the buyer feel special, which can lead to repeat purchases even for subpar products. The product experience itself is only one part of the whole. 

For digital products, the product experience is a much bigger part of customers’ overall experience with the company. 

A great product experience will have a significant impact on business performance. Understanding and optimizing your product experience can improve retention and reduce churn. Strong product experiences promote revenue growth and organic growth as well. 

If users are confused about features or they fail to realize value from your product quickly, they aren’t likely to stick around. 

You’ll likely see increased onboarding drop-off, product abandonment, and churn. Unused features mean underutilized products, which reduces expansion opportunities and leaves untapped revenue on the table. 

To avoid this, get users to their “aha moment” as quickly as possible. The key to a better product experience is understanding why users are behaving in certain ways and what to do next to deliver that maximum value to them, quickly. 

Delivering a great product experience is a science and an art. It’s vital to pay attention to user behavior, so that you can spot issues quickly, optimize your product, and offer personalized experiences. 

Understanding your users will give product managers and designers valuable insights into key elements of exceptional product experience, and help you spot if something's going well (or alert you quickly if something has gone off the rails). 

Here are a few key elements to monitor:  

Product performance and reliability are arguably the most important elements of product experience. If your product crashes, loads slowly, or presents lots of friction, no amount of fine-tuning will fix things, and users will lose patience. 

Make sure loading times are fast, friction is minimal, and functionality is consistent across devices. 

Onboarding is one of the first experiences that users get with your product, and product managers need to optimize onboarding to shorten time-to-value (more on that metric below). As we mentioned above, getting users to realize value and reach their aha moment quickly is a key tenet of product-led growth. 

Effective onboarding will offer contextual guidance and education so that users can understand your product quickly. Disclosing features progressively as users learn more allows them to get comfortable with your product without feeling overwhelmed. 

Intuitive product navigation has become the standard, and customers expect it. If navigation is confusing or inconsistent, users will leave quickly and probably not return. Make sure you have clear information architecture and consistent design patterns to create predictable user flows. If users don’t have to think about how to navigate your product, they will spend more time focused on its functionality and the value it offers them. 

As Mixpanel’s Senior Product Manager, DJ Satoda explains: 

"As AI makes software 10x easier to build, products risk becoming bloated and cumbersome to navigate. I believe protecting key flows and ensuring users reach value quickly will be essential for retention, engagement, and growth over the next few years."

A powerful product with lots of advanced features is useless if your users can’t find the features they need. Feature discoverability enables feature adoption, which ensures that users are getting the most out of your product. Strategic feature introduction through onboarding and in-app guidance will help users discover features more quickly. 

“Your users are busy. There's a lot competing for their time and attention. It's much more impactful to intentionally surface the right feature at the right time than overwhelming them with every option." 

Usage analytics will also help you identify underutilized features and increase feature adoption. 

There’s no single metric to measure product experience. Nevertheless, it’s important to gather data that will give you insights into user behavior to deliver the best possible product experience. Here are a few essential product experience metrics to track, along with some advice on how to set up analytics for product experience. 

Time to value (TTV) measures how quickly users achieve their first success with your product. You need to optimize and shorten the road to value as much as possible to keep users engaged. 

As Mixpanel’s Staff Product Manager, Sharan Multani explains: 

"Users naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance when completing tasks. If time-to-value isn't optimized, they'll either devise workarounds to accelerate it or migrate to alternative products that deliver faster results."

Feature adoption rates tell you which features drive engagement and retention. They also let you know which features your users either aren’t finding (a sign to improve feature discoverability) or aren’t seeing value from (a sign that your roadmap might need tweaking). 

User flow completion shows you where users drop off in key journeys. Funnel analysis can also help you spot conversion problems and identify untapped opportunities. 

Cohort retention rates show you how different groups of users experience your product, and how that impacts their long-term usage. Cohort analysis helps you group and track users by their behavior and characteristics. 

Customer effort score tells you how much work users must do to accomplish a task or complete an interaction. Lower customer effort implies a better, smoother product experience. 

To track, analyze, and report on the metrics listed above, you need powerful analytics solutions that will give you meaningful PX insights. Self-serve analytics that don’t require SQL knowledge or data team dependency give your entire team access to the insights they need to optimize product experience. 

Event-based tracking gives you a more complete view of user behavior than pageview analytics, which were designed with a website-first approach (rather than a user-first perspective). 

Custom event definitions with features like Lexicon and Custom Events allow you to tailor your analytics and track events for business-specific actions while keeping your entire team aligned.   

When you start to analyze and improve your product experience, there are a few challenges that often appear. Let’s take a look at how to solve them. 

As we mentioned above, getting users to their aha moment quickly delivers a good product experience and fuels product-led growth. If users aren’t finding value quickly, they will abandon your product and most likely go find one that works better for them. 

Solution: Optimize onboarding with data-driven insights.

Use digital analytics to analyze successful user paths to first value and replicate those paths for your broader user base. Identify common friction points in the initial experience and A/B test solutions to eliminate them. Use cohort analysis to test different onboarding approaches and deliver more personalized experiences. 

If users aren’t adopting features, they aren’t getting the full product experience. That means you’re wasting money and resources to develop features that aren’t being used, and your customers likely aren’t getting as much value from your product as they could. Over time, this leads to lower retention. 

Solution: Use behavioral segmentation for targeted feature introduction.

There are a few things you can do to improve feature adoption. First, make sure to measure adoption impact on retention and growth, so that you can see which features are most important for product experience (if a highly-adopted feature correlates with high churn rates, that should be investigated). 

Identify user segments most likely to adopt new features and create personalized feature discovery experiences tailored to different segments and optimized for different user behaviors.  

High churn rates are a sign that your product experience isn’t delivering what it promises and your users aren’t finding value from your product. 

Solution: Implement predictive analytics for proactive intervention.

Use your digital analytics to proactively identify behavioral patterns that predict retention or churn. For example, many product managers find that customers who complete onboarding are more likely to stick around. They look for ways to nudge their users to complete onboarding quickly so that they’re more likely to find value. 

It’s also useful to create automated alerts for at-risk users. Test different intervention strategies and measure effectiveness to inform future decisions. 

Product experience is a race: Digital companies are all competing to deliver the best to their users and be the first to do it. Being ahead of the pack as the digital landscape evolves is not just the secret to growth—it’s the key to survival. 

AI-powered personalization is evolving quickly, and we at Mixpanel believe that, pretty soon, machine learning for experience optimization will become the norm, with automated A/B testing for digital continuous innovation and AI-powered Metric Trees. Internal optimization processes like the OADA Loop will fuel rapid iteration and growth. 

The next stage in optimized, personalized product experience is real-time experience adaptation. Dynamic user interfaces based on user behavior will deliver contextual feature recommendations and provide instant feedback loops for experience optimization. 

And most importantly, powerful digital analytics will help you deliver the product experience your users deserve. Optimize your product experience with real-time, actionable insights. Try Mixpanel for free and start connecting user behavior to business outcomes today.