| I think the point of real-time analytics is not to make product decisions but to get a sense of presence from your product and celebrate with your team. As an engineer on many teams shipping features I've found that it's somehow underwhelming to finally launch something after months of work. You launch and the only thing you get to celebrate is some donuts in the office and if something goes wrong a notification from Sentry or Datadog :P I've spent the past 3 years building a product analytics tool (https://june.so) and I think product analytics can deliver some real-time value to teams. Some of the ways we've built our product to do this is: - Live notifications in Slack for important events - to get pinged in a Slack channel when users use the feature you just launched - Achievements on reports for your features - to celebrate the first 5, 10, 25 and 50 users using your product, see the progress live I think for team morale, especially in the earlier days of a company it's great to celebrate small wins and as engineers we should be more connected to what happens inside of the products we build - not only when things go wrong. |
Seeing people using a hard-to-build feature a couple times a day, then more, until eventually you have to mute notifications to focus on work is a great way A/ to feel the progress, and B/ notice trends you can't pick out in averages.
Example for A: Just yesterday our CTO wrote in a feature-specific channel: > This page is now unreadable due to volume of usage pings! Go team!!
Example for B: Intuitively noticing whether your tool, that has say 6 DAUs on a team, is being used once by all 6 people, or in 3 pairing sessions, or something in between. Yes could run an analysis for this, but at an early stage co it's easier to just notice.
We became June users at our pre-launch co a few months ago, and the feature 0xferruccio mentioned is part of what sold me initially.
Not sure how long it'll remain useful but loving it for now.