Introducing the Audit Matrix
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Using the STARS framework on Bucket, you can quickly establish a consistent baseline for customer engagement and satisfaction of any feature.
But how does one feature compare to other key features in your product? And how do those comparisons change over time?
Answering those critical questions has just gotten a whole lot easier as we’re introducing the Bucket Audit Matrix!
The latest Bucket update introduces an essential feature for any product leader. An intuitive visual that charts all of your features side by side including changes over time with trendlines.
The Audit Matrix
The matrix is a wonderful visualization for comparing features side by side across two dimensions. The default typically shows adoption on the x-axis and frequency of use on the y-axis.
In B2B SaaS, most customers should be using key features at least once every subscription cycle. If customers don’t, they’re likely becoming a churn risk.
Therefore, if you have a monthly subscription cycle, you want to make sure that the key feature frequency is at least monthly, and ideally weekly or bi-weekly. If the feature isn’t used often and is a key feature for customers, you want to work on moving the feature upwards.
Then once the feature is sticky, you want to move it to the right and get more customers to use it.
Lastly, once the metrics look good, you want to increase customer satisfaction to make sure customers are happily retained.
Demo
Let’s see what the Bucket Audit Matrix looks like in action!
In this example, we’re looking at our fictional Slack competitor “Slick”. We’re tracking two recent feature releases - huddles and video recordings - and comparing them to one of our key features - sending chat messages.
From the list view, we jump to the matrix comparison view. We can quickly tell that our new features (marked yellow as in evaluation period) aren’t seeing the same engagement as our key feature.
We can even see in the trendlines that the engagement has been decreasing drastically since the initial release. Users showed interest and tried the features but didn’t really find them valuable enough to keep using them.
That’s alarming! The huddles feature is intended to be a new key feature in our Slick product.
To investigate further, we swap the frequency axis with satisfaction - the qualitative layer on Bucket - to see how the features compare in this dimension. As feared, the satisfaction scores aren’t very high.
To learn why, we click the huddle feature to dive into the actual customer feedback. Here’s one piece of feedback:
"We'll stick with Zoom until we can use huddles for all-hands, too"
This indicates that the huddles feature is appealing but simply not feature-rich enough to be a viable alternative to something like Zoom.
So, we’ve validated the feature idea based on initial adoption (interest) and qualitative feedback, but we’ve also discovered that we need to invest in this feature to make it successful. If we do so, there’s a good chance we can move it up and to the right on the audit matrix, and grab a chunk of Zoom!
Get started today
The Audit Matrix is one of the most powerful visualization methods in a product leader’s toolbox and indispensable at any roadmap planning meeting. It works out of the box on Bucket as all features are tracked using the STARS framework and therefore comparable on the same axes.
To get started, simply start at Free trial and navigate to the Matrix view in the top right corner.
Happy roadmapping! 🏄