Product performance is a key factor that influences customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. As a product engineer, you want to ensure that your product delivers the best value and experience to your users throughout its lifecycle. But how do you optimize product performance from ideation to retirement? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve this goal.
Before you start developing your product, you need to define what performance means for your product and your users. What are the key metrics and indicators that measure how well your product performs? How do you align them with your business objectives and user needs? How do you set realistic and achievable performance targets and benchmarks? By defining clear performance goals, you can establish a common vision and direction for your product team and stakeholders, and guide your product decisions and trade-offs.
One thing I have found useful is to have performance goals consistent across value streams. For example, from a banking app perspective, if the goal is to on-board customers successfully, then the performance goal has to be very clearly articulated like - 50% of the customers who have onboarded to the app need to be digitally active, or - 80% of the customers who have on-boarded to the app, should have their savings goal setup in the first 30 days of joining. These sort of the performance based objective, makes it clear for the team and makes them excited to achieve it. This also makes it easy to report on the performance of the product ongoing.
Performance testing is a vital part of product engineering that helps you evaluate how your product behaves under different scenarios and conditions. Performance testing can help you identify and resolve issues such as bottlenecks, errors, latency, scalability, reliability, and security. By implementing performance testing throughout your product development cycle, you can ensure that your product meets your performance goals and expectations, and delivers a consistent and high-quality user experience.
Performance testing is not enough to optimize product performance. You also need to monitor and analyze how your product performs in the real world, with real users and data. By collecting and analyzing performance data, you can gain insights into how your product is used, what are the pain points and opportunities for improvement, and how your product compares to your competitors and industry standards. By using tools such as analytics, dashboards, feedback, and surveys, you can track and measure your product performance and user satisfaction, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your product.
Product performance is not a one-time task or a fixed state. It is a dynamic and ongoing process that requires constant evaluation and improvement. As your product evolves, so do your users, markets, technologies, and environments. To optimize product performance throughout its lifecycle, you need to adopt a continuous improvement mindset and culture. This means that you are always looking for ways to enhance your product features, functionality, design, quality, and value, and that you are open to feedback, experimentation, and learning.
Product performance optimization does not end when your product reaches the end of its lifecycle. You also need to plan for how to retire your product gracefully and responsibly. This involves communicating with your users and stakeholders, providing support and alternatives, ensuring data security and compliance, and decommissioning your product resources and assets. By planning for product retirement, you can minimize the negative impact of your product discontinuation, and preserve your brand reputation and customer loyalty.