Take the first step

In the past couple of months, I have spoken to several companies as a consultant and identified several common issues they face. Many of these issues form a chicken-and-egg loop that must be broken to make progress. Changing some habits requires strong collaboration and top-level agreement, which can be challenging to initiate quickly. However, regardless of your approach to evolving your product, there's one thing you can start doing today if you haven't already:

Start capturing telemetry from your product.

1) Capture errors from both frontend and backend: It's essential to know everything that's happening in the code to fix errors. No one cares about new features if your product frequently demonstrates errors.

2) Measure reliability: Track metrics like the number of showstoppers, uptime, and time to recover. Understanding your product's reliability is crucial. If reliability is poor, prioritize improving it over other tasks.

3) Measure activation and adoption of features: Releasing a feature is just the beginning. Track who is using the new feature and how frequently. Without this data, you can't be sure it's solving a user's problem effectively.

4) Set and measure outcomes: Every feature is built to solve a specific problem. Measure the baseline to prove the problem's existence, set a threshold for improvement, and track progress with each release.

Building this data loop helps you understand your product's real performance and how it evolves. It also provides compelling evidence of which decisions were beneficial and which were not. This data will help you break the feature factory cycle, which is inevitable if you don't measure these aspects.