If you are a product analyst at a junior position, you don’t always have the opportunity to participate in the first stage of ideation for the big picture with the stockholders. You are normally debriefed by the Product Manager, and digest the informations passed on to you. Then you are asked to define the KPIs, propose a tracking plan and do a quantitative study within a week. So the result is : you give a report of numbers to the PM who will communicate the results to the stakeholders. Of course this is a functional process, but there’s no storytelling. If you want to have more stakes in this process, in other words, if you want to have some contribution on the final decision making, you have to quickly grasp the why behind the change of this feature.
Even more so, sometimes when an old feature gets "rediscovered" because some business holders think « it could be beneficial ». It’s pretty difficult to measure the potential value without the historical data, but this is another topic. Quick DISCLAIMER: this article is going to cover my experience about the role, and it doesn’t necessarily represent what my current or former employers think.
Even more so, sometimes when an old feature gets "rediscovered" because some business holders think « it could be beneficial ». It’s pretty difficult to measure the potential value without the historical data, but this is another topic. Quick DISCLAIMER: this article is going to cover my experience about the role, and it doesn’t necessarily represent what my current or former employers think.
This silo situation is common when you have an analyst role in a feature team because you intervene at a later stage and only have pieces of information.
The following 3 tips may seem obvious, but it could make a difference if applied right :
1. Go and ask questions.
This seems intuitive but PMs always seem so busy in between meetings and have little time for questions, however, it’s also their job to serve as a bridge between stakeholders and the feature itself. The earlier you get the answers right, the quicker you will be able to deliver the results.
2.Stop looking further if there’s nothing to look for.
Sometimes we could get lost in details or we just want to justify the reason why certain changes didn’t bring a significant uplift on conversion. It doesn’t matter how much you are "convinced" because of your intuition, if the numbers don’t reveal some interesting insights, drop the subject and keep iterating with the PM.
3.Get rid of the overloading numbers that you can’t explain.
We have all been there : proud of our final report but we have a hard time summarizing the key takeaways. If you can’t explain the "why" behind a number that you provide, simply don’t use it, it will only confuse the people reading it.
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