Forget Assumptions. Stay Focused on Facts

Are you making assumptions about your product? Try measuring it and then improve it.

It's quite common to find developers and software companies trying to understand how successful are their products based on the number of downloads of its installers and assuming that the users are using their software the way they think they do. It's even more common on small companies that don't do any kind of analytics and it's also true that the reality is often completely different.

Here at DeskMetrics, our team is seeing it everyday. A recent example of this case is one of our customers, a software company that sells Windows utilities. This company have a software translated to many languages and distributed to the whole world. They thought it was the most used software they had because it was the most downloaded - based on information available in downloads websites - but once they started using our services they saw that another software they had, smaller and simpler, focused only on their national market was 2 times more executed than the previous one. It was engaging the users much more than they were expected.

Making decisions based on assumptions is not a good idea if you're not measuring it. Business decisions requires you to make assumptions, but you need relevant information so you can validate those assumptions later. Every change you make on your product should be measured. You can use the metric data on future decisions and get much better results. If you find that the data you have is not supporting you, it's a sign that you need to rethink your decisions.

If can't measure it, you can't improve it.

It's very important that you understand how your software is working for your users, so you can focus your efforts in a more productive way and spend less money. Just by adding some metrics to what you are building, you will immediately see many benefits. To be able to validate those previous assumptions is one of them.

Building your own analytics takes a lot of engineers' time, requires machines, serious infrastructure and slows down development process. It's often not worth to companies to give up some of their resources to build analytics tools internally, and that's one of the reasons why we built DeskMetrics, so can you focus on developing your application, selling it (and earning more money) and leaving all worries about infrastructure and building a great analytics tools with us.