Analyze - Dashboarding
Objective
Comprehensive business intelligence data visualized effectively is the crux of making good decisions on the fly and ultimately iterating to success. Having a combination of system, user, and support data on a dashboard provides invaluable insights.
Principles
Things we like to track on product dashboards:
- Product KPIs - These are usually user events and behavior funnels.
- Business KPIs - Things like revenue, retention, and costs.
- System Health KPIs- Application level errors, server errors, load, etc.
- Customer Relationship KPIs - Support requests, support response times, etc.
- Product Team KPIs - Velocity, active stories, open pull requests, etc.
Tools & Services
While there are a ton of absolutely wonderful and viable tools on the market, we usually use a mix of the following tools depending on the given situation and needs:
- Mixpanel - An absolutely wonderful multi-platform analytics, identity management, and event tracking tool for consumer facing applications. It has powerful data segmenting capabilities, but the integration notifications functionality is the icing on the cake.
- Intercom.io - One of the better streamlined CRM / Helpdesk tools out there. A great fit for early stage products as it supports integration of user and behavior data.
- Zendesk - Probably the most powerful, user friendly helpdesk solution on the market. It has a plethora of integrations with other services and is highly recommended if you want a more traditional helpdesk solution.
- Google Analytics - Tried, true, and free. Google Analytics has come a long way in building out their support for native mobile applications and real time visbility into user behavior.
- Geckoboard - If you are using lots of third-party services and want a consolidated dashboard that pulls the most important snippets of data from those services, this is the tool for you. It's also really nice because it allows you to send custom data from your own products for charting and display alongside data from other services.
- Notable Mentions - KissMetrics, Google Docs, Artisan, Tenxer
