When MySpace was the leader in social networking, they never thought Facebook would catch up. But, there was a stark difference in how both of these companies operated, and it had everything to do with the different metrics they used to track their progress.
Read MoreI was motivated by a post on Reforge called Good Experiment, Bad Experiment in relation to growth, which was inspired by a classic post from Ben Horowitz on Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager.
As a company, we’ve been running product experiments for a long time, and more recently, we’ve started doing more “digital growth experiments” with our clients. Digital experiments are still growth experiments but focused on larger organizations who struggle with moving from idea to product or service quickly.
Read MoreYou wouldn’t grab an umbrella without first looking outside, and you probably don’t stop to fill your car’s gas tank before checking the handy fuel indicator. But when you’re inside the walls of a company, it can be all too comfortable to fall back on gut feelings and the mantra of “we’ve always done it this way.” Sometimes sticking to what you’ve always done as an organization is the right move, but you’ll never be able to know for sure unless there’s a process in place to make sure everyone is always looking out the window to see if it’s raining before you decide to grab the umbrella. This shift doesn’t happen overnight--it comes about as a result of developing a strong data culture.
Read MoreIt’s a fact that for most restaurant owners, often already thin margins are generally made even thinner when partnering with delivery service apps. The likes of Caviar, Postmates, DoorDash, and others get by thanks to perpetual fees, with some businesses reporting their profitability has actually decreased as their delivery business has increased.
Read MoreJohn’s stomach churned. He just read the retention numbers on the iOS app he recently released. They were bad. Worse than ever before. He gazed out of his office window as if the answers were swirling in the wintery abyss above LaSalle Street. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless meetings, and for what?
Read MoreWhy would Instagram hide the ability for users to see the number of likes on a post? The answer is simple: They are trying to make Instagram the “safest place on the internet,” which means their product should match that vision.
But, what’s interesting about it is how they are going about this change. Instead of a previous culture of “move fast and break things,” Facebook and its group of apps have turned into experimentation.
Read MoreOnce upon a time a hamburger restaurant called McDonald’s shared its success with the world via two-digit counters on its storefront signs that showed how many billion hamburgers it had served to date. Virtually every shop had one and from the 1950s into the 1990s the counter slowly ticked up periodically--20 billion, 50 billion, 65 billion, 80 billion.
Read MoreWhy does Google personalize your YouTube recommendations?
Why does Facebook show you only recommended posts and not every post from all your friends in the order in which they were posted?
The simple answer to that is this: because the data told them you would like this.
Read MoreOnce we made the shift to building products with a focus on product analytics, event tracking, and testing features, we made generous leaps in creating product ROI. Our clients’ apps were selling more, app ratings were going higher, and the number of customer support calls started decreasing.
Read MoreI’ve personally seen the mobile app industry evolve significantly over the past 10 years. It looks something like this:
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