Introducing Focus Mode
We’re delivering engagement metrics for any feature with Bucket’s turn-key feature report. It empowers product teams to quickly learn, if their feature is done or needs another iteration.
Having feature-scoped analytics at your fingertip is a major step in the right direction compared to the status quo. However, the problem with dashboards is this: They’re only useful when you look at them.
We believe that product teams need feature metrics to be pushed into their existing workflow for them to be used sufficiently and repeatedly.
Today, we’re releasing the first of several workflow features that’s designed to embed Bucket’s feature metrics into the existing workflow of modern product teams.
But first, let’s quickly unpack the problem.
Short feature attention span
Nowadays, product teams are really efficient in designing, building and delivering features. Once the feature has been deployed, the team (rightly) celebrates, and soon after moves on to the next backlog item. That’s the problem.
The existing feature development toolkit has improved dramatically in the past decade. As an industry, we now have streamlined, powerful tools that help us “ship faster”. It’s terrific for releasing features that work technically.
However, once the feature is deployed and is with the customers - which objectively is the most important part of the cycle - our existing tools takes us no further and we drop our attention at the most crucial time. It’s pretty nuts, really!
Introducing Focus Mode
Focus Mode enables product teams to keep an eye on the features that need attention the most - often newly released features - by pinning those in the UI and reporting their metrics to Slack.
Here's what it looks like:
Once a feature goes into Focus, it’s pinned at the top of the redesigned list view.
More importantly, it’s also featured in the new Focus report that’s sent to Slack every Monday morning.
The purpose of the report is to enable teams to easily skim live engagement metrics for newly-released features at least once a week. With this data, product teams can follow the “health” of a feature as it goes into production to the customers.
We believe such a workflow is transformative for any product and engineering team in terms of prioritizing backlog items vs live features that aren’t doing very well.
Rinse and repeat
How long should features stay in Focus, you might ask. In short, until the team can decide on one of the following three outcomes:
- Validated
- Needs new iteration
- Remove it
Most features will take at least a month to evaluate: Customers need to become aware of the feature, try it, become active users of it and hopefully stay retained over time.
Once the product team has sufficient data from the Bucket reports, and potentially customer feedback, too, they can make a decision on the feature and take it out of Focus.
Then, rinse and repeat with the next feature release.
Happy shipping!