How to measure a product usage

Product usage metric helps product leaders understand whether a product or a feature is engaging users well or falling short. Understanding the usage helps you determine if a feature needs a redesign, promotion to improve its adoption or if it needs to be sunset if you discover the feature isn’t useful to users.

How to measure?

You can measure the usage using BDF score. BDF is a framework that classifies the metrics into three parts – Breadth, Depth, and Frequency. These key indicators will help you assess product usage.

Breadth:

Breadth focuses on the number of users for a given account or a customer.

E.g. Number of active users for a given customer in the last month.

Identifying the monthly active users (MAU) will help you understand a customer’s product health and level of adoption. Irrespective of how many license/user seats a customer has bought, if the product is actively used by only a few users of the purchased licenses, there is a high possibility of customer churn out.

Depth:

Depth focuses on what users are doing with the product. It indicates whether the core features are used and valued by the users. As a product leader, you’ll have to determine the list of features that will help users realize the total value of the product. The number of core features that you identify can vary depending on how simple or complex your product is. I have choose 8 features as the key areas. You can define it according to your product.

E.g. % of users using the 8 key features.

Frequency:

It measures how often users access the product and gives a frequency indicator that you use to validate against your success criteria. The success frequency criteria vary with the product. For example, a mood tracking app may expect users to check-in their mood once a day, meanwhile, a shopping app would aim for a once-a-month frequency.

E.g. Number of logins across all the users for a given customer in the last 30 days.

BDF Score:

When you combine all three, you get a BDF score that provides the necessary insight into your product prioritization. If the score is 3, your product is doing good, if it is 2 or less, you’ll have to understand the cause and improve the product to address the gap.

That is how you measure product usage, Thanks for reading.