Product Metrics: The Trickle-Up Method
Everything Affects Everything
One of my first major projects at Townscript was starting the product metrics tracking. Naturally, this wasn’t something I could do on my own. So, Sachin Sharma, Himanshu Singh and I built an approach for tracking Townscript’s growth.
The Trickle-Up Method
Disclaimer: While there is an economic precedent with the same name, we are not looking at how money flows between different sections of society or markets.
Our approach says that the smallest parts of your business, the ones you’re not looking at as carefully as you should, have the power of driving the most significant parts of your business forward.
A simple optimisation in one single funnel of your product can drive revenue, engagement or anything else you care about way further.
So, to get the growth that is relevant to you, focus on what you think isn’t as relevant to you. In other words, let every little increase trickle-up to help grow your product.
The Steps
There are 5 steps to creating a trickle-up product metrics flow.
Step 1: Write It All Down
We began by documenting everything relevant to our context in terms of growth at Townscript. The process was a little cumbersome, but we listed down everything that mattered to us in terms of Townscript’s growth.
The list was long. It had essential funnels, dropoffs we wanted to reduce, standard metrics like sales and NPS et al.
Once we had everything listed out, we could go further.
Step 2: Organize Everything
Now that we had everything we thought was relevant and not-so-relevant, we put it all in a spreadsheet. Yes, spreadsheets are still relevant, even more so today than ever.
Once we had things down in rows and columns, we started to organise them into Modules.
Each Module was directly derived from our product. Some examples of these, for some internet apps, could be a News Feed, Listings, Signup Flows et al.
Each core function (which would already be a module or separate app in your code) contains some metrics specific to it.
An example from our context is Content Management. Townscript has a lot of content, media and text, uploaded on it in different ways. A metric for this module could be the percentage of events with high-quality content.
Every Module was identified, and each metric was put into a Module. Some parameters were parts of multiple metrics, and that is okay. Businesses and applications are complex, and some parts/features have direct relationships with each other.
Step 3: Visualise It
For this, we initially used Coggle but then quickly moved to Whimsical. There are, of course, different tools.
The idea is simple: Visualise relationships between your modules, their metrics, and their core funnels and actions.
Why should we do this? Spreadsheets are great, but they aren’t intuitive. Once you make something visual, you can see at a glance what affects what, and how!
If you look at the chart below, you can see the flow of how growth moves from the lowest modules to the top ones.
That’s what the Trickle-Up method for Product Metrics is, however, there is one last step left.
Step 4: Measure It
All said and done; there is a problem. You need to measure your growth (notice the ?s in the above chart), and just by how much increase in one small metric or module pushes growth for your key metrics above.
The idea is to start with the lowest metrics and move upward. Look at it as a bottom-up approach of programming — the parts make the whole.
Measuring here is of two different contexts:
- Measure (or track) each minor and significant metric.
- Measure how some change in one affects the ones above it.
Step 5: Iterate
Once you know how one funnel moves growth above, you can choose to iterate. Maybe, you can divide modules further based on core actions.
Also, once you optimise your funnels or lower-level metrics, you can see how they affect growth that is relevant to you in your higher-level metrics.
It All Comes Together
The idea is straightforward — Everything affects everything. The Trickle-Up method gives you a one-stop-shop to look at what moves what, and how it all comes together.
How do you track your product’s growth? Is it similar to how we’re doing it? If not, do you think you’d like to go with this approach? Let me know in the comments.
