Executive summary
As a business intelligence solutions provider, ProfitWell (now part of Paddle) knows the importance of basing decisions on concrete data. After implementing LogRocket, ProfitWell immediately got to work applying insights informed by consumer data to prioritize which features its customers wanted to see most.
“LogRocket serves as another data point we add to our lists and our framework to decide which products to work on,” said Hannah Wei, product manager at ProfitWell. “I go into LogRocket and see what customers want, what they need, and what will actually get us more customers.”
ProfitWell leverages LogRocket’s consumer data for more than just feature prioritization.
Hannah and the product team use Mixpanel and LogRocket in tandem to identify consumer trends over time and dig into the specifics of each user’s personal story. These insights have helped ProfitWell’s engineering team zero in on existing features customers use most frequently — and the bugs that interrupt UX most often.
“We saw we had a few bugs around cash flow, so we had to prioritize fixing that,” said Hannah. “We wouldn’t have prioritized it otherwise, but we saw in Mixpanel and LogRocket that there was a huge spike in people looking at cash flow through our app.”
The qualitative and technical data provided by LogRocket supplements the deep quantitative product data from Mixpanel for a complete picture of user behavior.
These project management decisions help ProfitWell engineers tailor their monthly workload to meet the needs of their most active and engaged users.
Enabling a data-driven prioritization process
Prioritizing the right features, fixes, and integrations is a great way to keep customers happy. But when there’s a laundry list of tasks slated for the month, how can teams decide what needs to get done tomorrow and what projects they can safely punt on until next quarter?
“We want to make sure first and foremost that we’re supplementing and supporting customers where they need it,” said Hannah Wei, product manager at ProfitWell. “After that, we look at how to delight our customers.”
ProfitWell is a subscription software service that helps companies achieve faster recurring revenue growth, reduce customer churn, optimize pricing, and grow their subscription businesses end-to-end.
The subscription software service specializing in business intelligence gives companies access to accurate subscription reporting and analytics through mobile and web apps. They offer several integrations with SaaS companies, including Stripe, Chargify, Zapier, Databox, and others.
“We make it easy to gather, analyze, and understand this data — and it’s all free,” said Hannah. “We deliver these insights, and we don’t charge customers until they start improving their performance around customer churn and retention rates.”
ProfitWell’s product and engineering teams use LogRocket along with other analytics tools, including Mixpanel, to see what current customers are doing in the app.
Hannah uses Mixpanel to monitor how customers are using different features over time at a high level. Then, she digs deeper into user data with LogRocket to get a clearer vision of who users are and what they’re trying to accomplish during particular sessions.
“I look at what customers are doing as a whole and how user behavior is changing month to month,” explained Hannah. “This way, it’s easier to note trends that develop over time.”
Recently, Hannah saw in Mixpanel that there was a sharp increase in the number of users looking at ProfitWell’s cash flow page. The anomaly occurred shortly after the COVID-19 epidemic spread worldwide. This long-range view of user data helped point Hannah in the right direction.
“From Mixpanel, I went into LogRocket,” she said. “I built a page where I tracked the people who are actually visiting the cash flow page. I clicked into it, exported the file of customers, and saw who these users were.”
LogRocket’s granular analytics capabilities provided valuable context to explain the new trend in user behavior.
“This let me understand more of their story — I gained insight into their monthly recurring revenue, company size, and industry,” she said. LogRocket revealed that a significant portion of customers checking cash flow on a daily basis were B2C companies.
“I thought, what’s the bigger picture here?”
Based on this data, Hannah inferred that B2C users were concerned about changes in cash flow spurred on by the widespread economic implications of COVID-19.
“We had a few bugs around cash flow, so I noted that we should prioritize those issues,” said Hannah.
Hannah presented her findings to ProfitWell’s developers. The engineering team quickly tackled issue resolution to improve UX in this high-traffic area of the site.
"We wouldn’t have otherwise prioritized these bugs, but we saw in LogRocket that there was a huge spike in people looking at cash flow through our app"
Mixpanel and LogRocket have helped ProfitWell get feature and issue prioritization down to a science.
Aligning integrations with consumer demand
Identifying integrations that set ProfitWell customers up for success is a big part of Hannah’s role. LogRocket helps her identify which integrations to push and which to put on the back burner.
“I go into LogRocket and see what customers want, what they need, and what will actually get us more customers,” said Hannah. “When I’m making recommendations on which integrations to work on next, I have a framework around how we think. I look at different columns of data points combined into a weighted average that helps me decide which products to bring out next.”
Hannah can glean insights about which integrations customers are interested in based on the pages they visit. Right now, ProfitWell is launching its integration with HubSpot.
“I use LogRocket to track the people who are interested in using HubSpot, and then I talk to customers as soon as they’re hooked up with that integration,” said Hannah.
“I want to make sure what we’re building is actually useful for them. If it’s not, why are we putting months of engineering effort into building these integrations?”
Deciding which integrations to launch can sometimes be a tug-of-war. Beyond simply meeting customer needs, Hannah also needs to consider other business objectives.
“I’ll get pressure from the business side to move forward with certain integrations,” said Hannah. “I may get a request saying we need to integrate with a certain company because we have a great relationship with them.”
But if consumer data doesn’t support the integration, Hannah won’t move forward with it.
“I’ll go into LogRocket and see if an integration with a certain company will actually be beneficial according to the data we currently have on our customers,” she said. “If I see that a potential integration doesn’t align with what our customers are actually doing, I can confidently say we shouldn’t move forward.”
The quantitative data provided by LogRocket gives Hannah proof of customer interest to support her decisions as a PM.
Analyzing consumer data to plan for the future
In addition to prioritization, the ProfitWell product team also leverages LogRocket insights to plan for future adjustments to its business practices.
ProfitWell is based in Boston, but its user base spans the globe. Given its diverse customer demographics, the company is considering expanding its sales teams to better reflect its customers.
“We have North America, East Asia, and Western Europe as distinct demographics,” said Hannah. “Right now, we only support English, and we only have English salespeople. Eventually, we’ll use this data to see where the tipping point is for when we should invest in salespeople that speak different languages.”
ProfitWell has a geographically diverse array of interested customers, but certain demographics are especially active users. For example, Hannah noticed in LogRocket that ProfitWell has a large number of avid users in Southeast Asia.
“It would be great if we could start supporting their currencies and their languages better,” Hannah said.
With LogRocket, Hannah and the rest of the team at ProfitWell hope to continue being less reactionary and more calculated in their decision-making.
“We can be more predictive and planned in terms of how we handle customer situations and product decisions,” she said.
Want to see how LogRocket can help your team work more efficiently and develop data-driven plans for the future? Sign up for a free 14-day trial.
