Analytics

Overview

These skills are about understanding how to analyze data and quantify impact. You’ll need to know a few frameworks and metric categories. Most of the time, you’ll need familiarity with spreadsheet functions, although it’s often helpful to learn SQL as well to be able to get data. If you don’t know how to model things in a spreadsheet, start by searching for youtube videos on “business analysis with excel” and do a few examples.

Frameworks

Frameworks are structured processes for how to measure the performance of a given product behavior. They effectively give you a set of best practices and tools that you can use in a similar situation. In practice, the implementation of any framework is very company, product, and question specific. However, these are good starting points for thinking through the analytics process.

• AARRR: metric framework for evaluating product performance through the user lifecycle
• HEART: metric framework for evaluating UX experience
• Funnel analysis: analysis framework for evaluating performance through a funnel
• Cohort analysis: analysis framework to evaluating performance across cohorts
• A/B Testing: testing methodology to determine launch rollout ‍

Common Metrics

There are a few common metrics you can expect to see with software products. Each of them tell you common operational information that helps you measure progress and identify opportunities. The actual computation of these metrics can be simple or complex depending on the nature of the product.

• SaaS metrics: these metrics are commonly used in enterprise apps
• Engagement metrics: these metrics are commonly used in consumer apps
• Return on Investment: this type of metric is commonly used in prioritization and making trade-offs ‍

Further Learning

Additional areas to dive deeper into:

• Lean Analytics Book: a good primer on how to think about analytics
• Intro to SQL: basics for SQL‍

Checklist