The B2B trap with using Metrics

Good product teams attract smart people who want to make data-driven decisions. Quantitative product KPIs that show feature adoption, page use, daily/monthly active users, etc. are relatively easy to collect with the right tools like Pendo or Hotjar.

One of the benefits of cross-pollinating B2B product teams with people who have worked in B2C is that they typically bring bias, rigor, and experience with using such indicators to inform product decisions, and this is a good thing.

So what's the problem? Where's the trap?

The trap is over-indexing B2B product team focus and decision-making on these quantitative inputs at the expense of doing the hard work to collect qualitative input.

Whereas B2C teams have to base a majority of their input on these metrics because it is not feasible to talk directly to a statistically relevant sample of end users, B2B product teams have the opportunity and obligation to talk to all or at least a relevant subsection of customers directly. Recurring product-led customer check-ins, customer advisory boards, and user groups are examples of this kind of discipline.

This is the only way to uncover subtleties like a feature that doesn't perform well based on the KPI measurement but is a key reason customers selected your platform, a feature that may be used infrequently by a small number of power users but is still successful, the trade-offs between a feature that needs to be modified in some way vs. deprecated, etc.

Building direct customer relationships and qualitative input channels is time-consuming and difficult to scale for Product teams, but they must do it to avoid making poor product decisions on metrics alone.