Introducing Portfolio Summary: A better way to glean big picture product insights
“I thought I was going to get fired.” This sentence perfectly illustrates some of the stresses that executives face when making important decisions. Either it goes their way, or they are in a position of looking for their next job.
As Pendo’s director of product, I’ve spoken to nearly a dozen executives about an investment decision they had to make across their product portfolio. The stories were quite similar. They collected a ton of data–including sales, customer, market, and product data–to make their business case, and then there was a long wait while they determined if their big bet was successful. I call this wait the “leap of faith.” You can only collect so much information before you need to put plans into action and see what happens. This can be incredibly scary.
At Pendo, our goal is to arm product leaders and teams with the critical data to make investment decisions and understand how their investments are performing. To help, we built Portfolio Summary–a new performance report of all your products in one easy view, for big picture insights.
In this post, I’m excited to share some of the ways that a multi-app view can help make these investment decisions less terrifying.
Are my biggest accounts safe, or likely to churn?
Big customer accounts often use multiple products and, more importantly, can make up a significant portion of your revenue. Any good product leader keeps tabs on how the company’s biggest customers are using each installed product, but only a great product leader will be able to flag a warning when there is an early indication of churn. But how might you quickly alert yourself to this?
In Portfolio Summary, you can filter to an account-specific segment to gain a clear picture of how the selected account is interacting with each application. Has the number of active visitors decreased over time for a specific application? And has your Net Promoter Score (NPS) been going down as well for that same application? A “yes” to both questions may indicate increasing dissatisfaction and decreasing engagement–a warning sign for potential churn.
How can I plan for innovation within my portfolio?
As a product leader myself, I am on the lookout for where we can divest in a given product in order to pay for introducing a new innovative product to our portfolio. There is often a tension between prioritizing innovation, improving the user experience of the biggest money-making products, and sunsetting a product that’s been hanging on and declining for years. I need product data to help me make the best business decisions around my portfolio that I can.
Imagine a dashboard that shows that your NPS is beginning to drop, and the qualitative responses mention a few rather visible bugs. Your retention numbers begin to slack, and stickiness ticks down a few percentage points. Your metrics are screaming at you. You have quality or experience issues, and it is time to invest in improving the current experience.
Here’s a different scenario. NPS is higher than ever. Stickiness is staying stable or increasing a little bit. But your adoption numbers for your core features are lower than they should be. Should you invest in new features, or improve the experience for discovering the ones you already have?
To make these trade-offs wisely, Portfolio Summary allows you to compare and contrast data across products using the Apps table. If activity, NPS, and your product engagement score (PES) altogether show a precipitous and steady decline for a product that just hasn’t caught on, maybe it’s time to consider retiring the product, and shifting resources to other efforts. Or, in a different scenario, if PES is declining while NPS remains high, you may want to dig deeper, interview users, and see if there’s anything that can be fixed or salvaged in a product that users seem to love.
With ongoing pressure to make investment decisions with limited time, product executives need the right, relevant, and contextualized data to win. We hope that Portfolio Summary will provide a better way to quickly understand the overall health and engagement of all the products executives care about. If you are an executive at your company or know an executive who grapples with decisions like the ones above, start using Portfolio Summary today.
Note: Portfolio Summary is currently in open beta. If you’d like to enable it for your subscription, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
