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In my nearly 4 years at Amplitude, one of the most common customer deployment questions was around what flows are worth measuring. And while many product teams get wrapped around the axle on instrumentation questions, to me there’s a very simple method to figure out what your critical path is: pretend your product is having the worst outage in the history of your company and you have to bring the core service back online piecemeal until things stabilize – what are the P0 capabilities you have your incident response team working to revive?
It’s funny how a disaster can bring clarity to what really matters. This exercise usually results in a shortlist of features and components that are “business critical”. Stitch them together and you have your core workflow.
Getting good at this exercise, both the initial baseline and subsequent iterations, is a key part of product observability; this in turn is the foundation for driving growth, running experiments, scaling load, managing costs, and tackling adjacencies. Which is why I went and got Jon Harmer from Google to talk about their methodology for mapping and measuring critical user journeys (aka CUJs). There’s a whole Reforge deep-dive into how Google’s product teams utilize CUJs.
We started our conversation with a definition of CUJs, which Jon ties to (a) user jobs to be done and (b) the revenue generating customer flow – I think those are great signals to look for when trying to pinpoint your CUJ. If you’ve never bothered to spell out jobs to be done for your target user and are unclear how your product makes money, you have a different problem – you have user journeys but none are critical ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
We then touched on the different ways to actually get a baseline map of your CUJ, which include both quantitative and qualitative techniques. In fact, applying both methods likely results in a deeper understanding of your key flows. (This is something I’ve written about before).
Once you’ve got your CUJ mapped out, it serves as a baseline for both your operating objectives (e.g. service uptime, workflow throughput) and innovation goals (e.g. user adoption, market capture). Without this benchmark, you don’t know what good looks like or how high your ceiling might be, and your product work is just random bets lacking surgical sophistication.
The process of connecting (or attempting to connect) product work to company strategy through KPI trees is how you figure out whether you are working towards a launch (output) or a land (outcome). I’ve written and spoken (here, here, here) about connecting product bets to business outcomes before. The fascinating insight Jon shares here is that the majority of product features either add no value or detract from the core job to be done.
Over the course of our hour together, we hit on a bunch of other dimensions of user journey mapping and measurement, including:
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the need to end-of-life features that don’t apply to or enhance the CUJ
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the downside of precision when a simple thumbs up / down will suffice
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the rituals companies can introduce to maintain the sanctity of their CUJ
