Product Insights: Definition, Examples, and How to Collect Them

Ever feel like you're swimming in a sea of user data but struggling to catch anything useful? You're not alone.

Product insights can be a lifesaver. They'll give you a clear direction to build better features, improve user experience, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.

But what exactly are product insights, and how can they transform your product strategy? Let's dive in. 👇

What are product insights?

Product insights are the actionable findings gathered from data about your product and its users. They reveal how users interact with your product, what they need, and areas for improvement.

Think of them as the 'aha moments' that guide product teams on what features to develop, improvements to make, and how to enhance the user experience.

Example: if you notice that users consistently abandon your onboarding flow at a particular step, that’s a product insight. It tells you there's friction at that point, and now you know where to focus your improvements.

Product insights typically come from a combination of user feedback, behavioral analytics, A/B testing, customer support interactions, market research data, and competitor analysis. Unlike customer insights, which focus on understanding customer needs, desires, and motivations, product insights are centered on how users interact with the product itself.

It's about converting all that information into clear, actionable steps for your product team.

Why are product insights crucial?

Alright, so you get what product insights are, but why should you care?

Without product insights, your product strategy becomes a guessing game. You could end up building features no one asked for, tweaking experiences that don't need it, or missing glaring issues altogether.

Instead, product insights help you:

• Prioritize features: They highlight which features users value most, helping you decide what should be developed next for maximum impact.
• Reduce churn: They help identify friction points in the user journey, allowing you to address these pain points and keep users engaged.
• Improve user satisfaction: By understanding and resolving user issues, product insights lead to an improved overall experience.
• Provide valuable insights: Customer insights reveal patterns in user behavior, enabling you to know what to focus on, allocate resources more efficiently, and make overall better decisions.

Now, let's look quickly go over the different types of product insights! 👇

Different types of product insights

There are four main types of product insights. Each offers unique perspectives and deeper understanding that can guide your decision-making.

1. Behavioral insights

Behavioral insights focus on understanding how users interact with a product, including their preferences, habits, and motivations. This type of insight can reveal trends in user engagement, common pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

Example: Spotify's product usage data

Most of you'll agree that Spotify nails your music taste pretty well. Take for example the "Enchanced playlist" feature that automatically adds songs to your playlist.

They know what you like this by analyzing listeners habits and preferences. This enables them to offer personalized playlists and recommendations that keep you engaged and coming back for more.

2. Performance insights

Performance insights measure the effectiveness of a product in terms of meeting its intended goals. This can include metrics such as conversion rates, customer retention, revenue generation, and user satisfaction.

By analyzing performance insights, you can identify areas of strength and weakness and optimize your product accordingly.

Example: NPS and CSAT surveys

CSAT and NPS surveys are one popular way of gathering performance insights straight from the users themselves. You can track the customer satisfaction over time to analyze if there's something wrong.

Even better if your survey tool enables to combine them with follow-up questions to also understand the cause.

3. Usability insights

Usability insights are gathered through methods like usability testing to understand how easily and effectively users can navigate and use a product. They help you identify friction points that affect user experience and can guide UI/UX improvements.

Example: Netflix' usability testing

Netflix famously uses usability testing a lot to understand how users interact with their platform. They measure ease of navigation, task completion time, user satisfaction, and much more. This helps them identify and fix friction points, ultimately leading to better content discovery.

4. Market insights

Market insights involve understanding the external factors that influence a product's success, such as competitors, industry trends, and emerging technologies.

By doing market research and staying informed about market trends, you can make strategic decisions to differentiate your product and maintain a competitive edge.

Example: Competitor analysis

Probably all of us have looked at our competitors for inspiration at one point or another. By analyzing their products, you can find something they're doing well, but you don't have yet.

Even better if you can find something that neither of you have and there's demand for it. By identifying these types of insights, you can achieve feature parity and a competitive advantage.

How to gather product insights

Now, to the fun part—actually collecting the insights. You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to be methodical. Here are the most popular ways to collect product insights:

1. User feedback

Start with listening to your users. This could be direct feedback from feedback forms, support tickets, feature requests, or even reviews. Make sure to categorize the feedback to spot patterns.

Featurebase (👋 that's us), for example, lets you easily create a feedback forum and use in-app forms to collect customer feedback, including feature requests and bug reports.

But the best part is that you'll have everything in one place, where it's automatically categorized. Then, you can just easily analyze it to identify trends. You can even connect your customers' revenue to their feedback to understand the real value behind those ideas and much more.

2. Product analytics

Tools like Mixpanel or Google Analytics can help you see how users interact with your product. Look for metrics like drop-off rates, session lengths, and feature usage. These data points can show you where users are thriving and where they're struggling, giving you deeper insights into user behavior data.

Another popular method is using heatmaps from tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity (free). They show you where users click, scroll, or linger on a page. This is incredibly useful for visualizing which parts of your product get attention—and which get ignored.

3. A/B Testing

Want to validate a hypothesis? A/B testing is a great way to get direct insights into what works and what doesn’t. By comparing two versions of a feature, you can figure out what’s more effective and what leads to better user engagement.

A tool we'd suggest for that would be Posthog. They also have many other features for measuring product usage.

4. In-product surveys

In-product surveys are another very popular way to collect in-app feedback, mainly because of their flexibility. You can ask users whatever you want answers for in real time.

This can be in the form of short questions, ratings, or polls triggered by specific user actions. Asking for feedback at crucial moments of users' journey helps you understand their needs, pain points, and overall satisfaction better.

For example, with Featurebase, you can first ask users to rate their experience with your product and then, based on their answer, trigger follow-up question with an open text field.

The quantitative ratings give you the initial overview and the open-ended answers help you actually understand the real problems and causes.

5. Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis can provide insights into market trends and help you understand the competitive landscape. By analyzing competitor data, you can identify areas where your product offerings might need improvement to gain a competitive edge.

If you've been with a company or an industry for some time, you'll probably know all the key players by head.

But if you need to search for them, I've discovered that googling "Best [your functionality] tools" is a pretty good place to start. This will give you many listicles full of competitors. From there on, it's your job to get familiar with them. I usually start creating accounts for the ones I see repeatedly across lists. That means they're likely well-known.

Sidenote: If you're a marketer that uses Ahrefs, you can also see your competitors pretty well from the 'Organic competitors' tab of your site overview. Here's an example of it:

Product insights examples

To demonstrate the power of product insights, let's go over a few real-world examples:

• Feature improvement based on usage data: A project management tool notices that users frequently click the 'calendar view' option, but many abandon the feature shortly after. Realizing this, the product team runs a simple rating survey asking the low scorers what the calendar is missing. From the customer feedback, they discover that the calendar lacks customization options. This leads to adding custom tags and filters, which results in higher engagement with the calendar feature.
• Reducing drop-offs in onboarding: A fitness app identifies users dropping off during the onboarding flow, particularly when asked to set up personalized workout plans. Through user feedback and behavioral insights, the team discovered that the setup process is too lengthy. They simplify the flow, making onboarding quicker, which boosts completion rates by 30%.
• Improving checkout experience: An e-commerce platform realizes that users often abandon their carts on the payment page. By conducting in-product surveys, they find out that users are frustrated by limited payment options. As a result, the platform adds more payment methods, which significantly reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions.

So, product insights are basically the core of product teams. That's how product managers and owners decide what to focus on next. And in larger companies, there's even a special role in charge of it. 👇

Who is a Product Insights Analyst?

A Product Insights Analyst is responsible for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data to uncover actionable product insights.

This role typically involves working closely with product managers, designers, and developers to ensure that data-driven decisions guide product development. A Product Insights Analyst might use tools like Featurebase, Mixpanel, and Posthog to track feature requests, user behavior, and perform A/B testing to inform product strategy.

Who is a Product Insights Manager?

While a Product Insights Analyst is focused on the data and analysis side of product insights, a Product Insights Manager takes a more strategic role.

They oversee the entire insights process, from data collection to translating those insights into actionable strategies for the product teams to assisting product delivery. The Product Insights Manager often collaborates with stakeholders across the organization to ensure that product decisions are aligned with business goals.

Who's in charge of product insights?

Usually, the Product Insights Manager is in charge of product insights. They oversee the work of Product Insights Analysts and ensure that insights are being used effectively to guide product development.

Common pitfalls to avoid with product insights

• Ignoring qualitative data: Numbers are great, but qualitative data like user interviews can reveal the 'why' behind the 'what.' Use both qualitative and quantitative insights for a fuller picture.
• Paralysis by analysis: Don’t overthink it. At some point, you need to act on the data you have. Even small improvements can lead to big wins over time.
• Misinterpreting correlation as causation: Just because two things happen together doesn’t mean one caused the other. Be careful not to jump to conclusions without digging deeper.

Final thoughts

All in all, product insights are the core of all product teams and decisions surrounding the product. They tell you how users interact with your product, what they expect, and areas for improvement.

Fortunately, you don't have to be a data scientist to gather them or turn them into actionable insights.

Featurebase helps you discover product insights with in-app feedback forms and a feedback forum where users can submit and vote on feature ideas. You can also create surveys to measure NPS, CSAT, and ask users whatever you want answers for.

It comes with affordable pricing and a free plan. Plus, the onboarding is super quick, so there's no downside to trying it. 👇

✨ Start collecting feedback & discover product insights with Featurebase →