User Funnels are Magical

You built a great product or an excellent feature, but not many users came. You started with market analysis, developed a strong hypothesis and a product thesis, and ran it through user studies. You showed prototypes to customers and iterated based on their feedback. All with positive signals, but once you built it, the reception was underwhelming. So how do you debug it?

As an old saying goes: "telemetry, telemetry, quality." Without real telemetry, you don't stand a chance of analyzing your dilemma. Let's assume that you had fantastic telemetry built in. Where do you go from there?

It is painful to see a product or a feature flop when shipped. What most have in common is a lack of attention to detail. It is the missing user obsession. Many overlook the need for a clear and precise user funnel. It is not sexy work, but it is one of the better ways towards growth hacking.?

In 2015, I was part of the team that shipped the initial version of Microsoft PowerBI. We aimed to build a 5x5 SaaS offering in the self-service business intelligence space. 5x5 here refers to our unstoppable pursuit of a "5 seconds to sign-up; 5-minutes to WOW" experience. We wanted our users to have zero reasons for abandoning us. We wanted them to love our product, and to do that, we added detailed telemetry to every step of the product.?

For example, we built telemetry into our product landing web page and experimented with where to put the sign-up button. We measured the page load time of this marketing page and knew exactly how many potential customers we lost if the page took longer to load. We instrumented all errors on that page. We knew how often the page would fail to load and had methodically reduced it to almost zero. We learned how many people clicked the sign-up button and how many successfully completed the sign-up process. We tracked their mouse movement on the sign-up page and knew what questions to cut out of the sign-up process as they were creating an annoyance for the users. We reduced the whole sign-up process to just a single email address. No passwords, addresses, phone numbers, names, nothing!

We partnered with our Identity organization and convinced everyone why we only needed an email for sign-up. We monitored the identity API, tracked failures, and correlated the API's fluctuating latency with user conversion rate - it was a direct line. We created alerts on all these and monitored them like a hawk.?

There is a ton more to this story, but the takeaway is that a detailed and meticulous analysis of the user funnel is incredibly fruitful. Once you have demystified your system, you no longer find yourself in meetings hypothesizing or guessing why all your hard work is not turning into what you had expected. You have all the data to iterate and fix technical issues, improve experiences, simplify concepts, and sometimes change the whole feature.

User funnels are magical, and I wish every product, feature, and business review I attend showed their customer obsession by monitoring every click and understanding every technical glitch and error message.?

Shipping a feature is just half the work. The other half is optimizing its ROI.