How to Measure Your Product

Doshi frames measurement around whether people understand a product, can get started easily, and come back to use it. He maps growth to five steps: visits, signups, valuable actions, retention, and sharing. He recommends choosing three to five guiding metrics because large dashboards can confuse teams and stall decisions.

Doshi says a confusing landing page can send visitors straight to the Back button. Mixpanel initially used the tagline “Metrics That’ll Make You Drool” and tried to reach both startups and large companies. Customer conversations and iteration helped the company focus its message on measuring in-product actions, which distinguished it from Google Analytics. Signups and clicks on key links, such as pricing, can indicate interest.

Doshi recommends measuring a funnel from landing page to signup to a first valuable action, and checking how long it takes users to get started. He uses Google’s immediate search experience and Airbnb’s booking flow as examples of different levels of complexity. He advises startups not to add friction such as email confirmation before they need it, and to keep improving onboarding.

Doshi warns that viral growth can hide weak retention, creating a “shark fin” pattern as users leave faster than new ones arrive. He recommends tracking new-user retention over longer periods, daily active users, and monthly dollar churn for subscription businesses. At 7 percent monthly revenue churn, a business loses about 58 percent of its revenue over a year, making growth harder to sustain.

For teams with fewer than 50 users, Doshi says direct conversations can reveal more than charts alone. When Mixpanel could not run a useful A/B test on funnel layouts, 10 of 11 customers preferred a horizontal design, so the team built it. He recommends choosing one North Star metric for six months, reviewing it, and adding only a few other measures to monitor.