Why it’s important to monitor product health?
Today customers are seeking product experiences they can trust across a broad range of areas in addition to increasing product regulatory obligations or environmental, social, and governance expectations around product trust.
Traditional product management has focused largely on tracking revenue and cost or value indicators and more recently customer experience indicators.
Skyjed has built a trust-centered product management framework designed to put your customers at the centre of product lifecycle management.
The framework is a comprehensive, agile way of managing your new and existing products to deliver growth and customer trust.
Skyjed’s trust product management framework focuses on and produces a Product Health Check.
Skyjed’s Product Health Check is an instant visualisation of your products' current health status.
Skyjed's Product Health Check is:
- designed to measure product health over time as you conduct regular product monitoring. It provides insights and positive and warning indicators into domain areas of product health to consider in product growth and risk strategies.
- the Product Health Check meter uses a scale from negative to positive and neutral in the middle. The negative to positive scale indicates the % of performance ratings in the domain areas that are negatively or positively impacting product performance.
Today, product leaders use the Skyjed Product Health Check on their products across a variety of industries. While more traditional organisations monitor the financial performance of their products and portfolios, not all of them have a robust method to control non-financial risk.
It is estimated that in more than 50% of cases, product leaders are given little choice other than to make strategic or product risk decisions based on gut feeling or experience. Skyjed's Product Health Check presents instant product assessments to help improve product performance and decision making across core domains of product health.
The most successful companies adjust their product strategy based on insights and guidance from analysing a product’s health.
To further understand, let’s first define what is Skyjed’s Product Health Check?
How does Skyjed’s Product Health Check work?
When you create your product in Skyjed and commence regular product monitoring Skyjed monitors and analyses your product health across 6 domains of product health.
This will occur every time an audit template is completed in the product MONITOR workspace. When completing any audit template, you will note that each template contains ‘drivers’. The drivers are information or data prompts and are allocated to one of the 6 domains of product health in Skyjed.
Skyjed’s product health is an assessment of the domains and drivers in any audit template and can include assessments across a broad range of driver information prompts including sales, assessment of your target market, competitors, sustainability, complaints, and other financial or non-financial metrics for example.
Skyjed’s Domain Framework
Skyjed uses the following domains to generate your Product Health Check and assessment over time:
1. Revenue
2. Value
3. Customer Experience
4. Innovation
5. Regulatory
6. Sustainability
Within each Domain are the drivers.
Drivers are indicators of commercial success.
You can mark unnecessary drivers as not applicable in the status area when completing templates with drivers that are not applicable.
Every time you complete a new audit template in the MONITOR workspace for your product, it will capture an updated Product Health Check Score and give you insights into the domain and driver areas that are performing well and where attention is required for emerging opportunities or risks.
What is a Product Health Check Score?
The Skyjed Product Health Check Score is an AI-powered measurement of your product’s health. It helps you interpret how successful your product strategy is in the current landscape.
It is designed to help you track the performance of your product across more than just financial metrics. The collection of data not only includes financial metrics, but also operational and non-financial metrics.
The outputs from conducting regular monitoring in Skyjed enables product managers and leaders to monitor their product strategy and set risk mitigation or strategy action plans to improve product health.
Strategic product decisions are all about timing and the Skyjed platform can help you identify new opportunities and emerging risks giving you the power to succeed.
Skyjed’s Product Health Check Score is based on an algorithm and derived from the domain and driver data in your product monitoring audit. It is accessed from your INSIGHTS tab in the Product workspace.
Product Health Check Dashboard Explained
When looking at the Product Health Check Dashboard it provides the following key visual indicators and key insights and indicators:
- A Product Health Check Score percentage rating out of 100%
- A breakdown of each of 6 Product Health Domains and their Health Scores with a delta % comparison of the previous date range period or audit where available.
- The health index meter diverges from the centre point. The point of divergence is at 0 for positive and negative growth potential. The maximum possible score for both positive and negative is 100.
- The maximum Product Health Score possible is 100 and the minimum is 0.
- The most recent Audit Name and status/date that the Health Check has factored results up to. Product Health Check is designed to measure product health over time as you conduct regular product monitoring, so the score is based on your most recent audit in addition to previous monitoring.
- A color-coded health meter. The colors used in the health meter are:
- Dark Green: Very High positive growth potential or performance
- Green: High positive growth potential or performance
- Yellow: Moderate/neutral growth potential or performance
- Orange: Low or negative growth potential and emerging areas of risk
- Red: Very Low or negative growth potential and emerging areas of risk
- Unknowns: This is where a driver in the given audit has not had information completed and provides you with an indicator that there are still unknowns that may be impacting your health check score. This is where its important to mark drivers as not applicable if they do not apply or to complete the information inputs required.
- Red and Green warning indicators with messaging around domain performance that have had an increase or decrease of performance of +/-10% or more.
The power of the Skyjed Product Health Check is that you can click on any of the core components to conduct further analysis and insights. You can also click through on the areas of interest, and it will take you to the latest audit.
Take the below Product Health Check example.
In this example, we have selected/clicked on the Low (orange) icon.
This is highlighting that drivers in some domains need further attention and are rated as Low.
This is the first step for a product manager to seek to understand which drivers and areas of product health are needing attention.
The visual indicators show that the drivers in the domain Value, Customer Experience, and Innovation are contributing to the Low rating and impacting the product health.
The next step is to deep dive further by clicking on any of the orange indicator areas which will take you to the most recent audit for the product in the MONITOR workspace. It will also filter the drivers with low rating indicators for easy identification and analysis.
When looking at the Audit in the MONITOR workspace for the product, it will provide the following key visual indicators and insights for further analysis and action:
- In the top left corner, it will show the Audit name, status, and date.
- It will also show the rating filter, in this example the filter is Low, however, you can select the drop-down arrow to identify other drivers with rating selections.
- To the middle left, you will note the domains and the applicable drivers that have an input type that is relevant to the Low rating indicator. You can select any of the drivers identified and you will be able to identify the low-performing area that requires further investigation and attention.
- In the example, the driver is looking at Product market share.
- The driver input has flagged the performance as below target at 10% compared to 15% for the prior year.
- In this case, the product manager can create a strategy or risk mitigation action/s to further investigate, action, and prioritise as part of the product strategy.
- This results in areas of risk or importance being highlighted for attention.
- Adding strategy or risk actions in Skyjed is a valuable tool as it not only provides notifications and a prioritised product action plan, it also provides the action owner the notification of when the action is created for visibility and provides overdue notifications.
- All Strategy and Risk Actions are also automatically reported in all Skyjed reports for Risk & Strategy Actions and Governance purposes.
- It's a very useful tool for a product team to keep track of important items, and their status and ensure a team and management have oversight of all key work-in-progress actions and can make informed decisions around the product strategy and priorities for Risk and Strategy Actions.
- Ultimately all of these actions result in a product's health being managed proactively and improved over time.
Considerations for new products or lower-than-expected product health
When you first launch a product or complete your first monitoring template in Skyjed, it is possible that your Product Health Check score may be low.
There could be a number of reasons.
Some examples of a new product introduction is that you may not have found the product market fit. There may be uncertainty around your product strategy, and you may not have found a repeatable, scalable model which is reflected in your sales.
Likewise, you might also have a lower score on a mature product that has higher revenue but is subject to new entrants and disruption in the competitive landscape.
In every case, the relative change of the product index is actually more important than the actual numeric value of the index.
A low product health score can often be a reflection or consequence of the product being subject to increasing competitor activity, regulatory compliance, cost pressures, technology disruption, or rising customer expectations. It should not be considered a negative.
What is most important is that you track your product health over time and put in place action plans to improve or even decommission the product at the optimum time.
How can I use Product Health Check to make it useful?
Product Health Check Scores are often used as benchmarks.
In the case of the Skyjed Product Health Check Score, it is used to measure the performance of products or product portfolios over the life of a product.
For instance, product leaders can:
- Compare one product over time - Compare the health of a product over time: monthly; quarterly; or annually.
- Compare one product to another in the portfolio - Compare product A to product B across portfolios to provide insight into how much risk or growth exists across the product portfolio.
- Compare products for transparent updates to set and monitor risks or hurdles - Today, company governance requirements mean that boards and senior leaders must monitor non-financial risk and environmental and social measures. Proactively brief senior management when a health check score falls below 50% for products within the company for example and put them on a "product watch list". Provide updates to senior executives and board members in a transparent manner.
- Provide early warning for risk for product teams - Set a threshold with your product teams to flag and monitor products where the quarterly change in the product health has a negative variance of 10% for example.
Best practice tips:
The Skyjed Product Health Check can be used anywhere, at any time by product leaders.
It’s useful to review existing products, complete at launch-ready, use them prior to making a pricing change or for new regulations or even sun-setting products.
Based on our experiences, here are some of the leading practices for effective execution.
- Champion the use of Product Health Check across all products – new and existing.
- Join forces across the business and create a customised virtual team. The Product Health Check as a tool can be more productive with the diversity of functional and expert insights. Traditional silo-based product reviews are no longer useful.
- Set a consistent cadence. Best results are achieved with weekly, monthly updates and quarterly in-depth dive health check reviews.
- Avoid using the Skyjed Product Health Check as a replacement for your financial reporting. It is not a transaction tool – it complements your monthly financial reporting by adding in other domains like regulatory, customer, innovation, and sustainability domains.
Product Health Check is a powerful tool to reduce risk and meet your customer needs but be sure you are capturing a 360-degree view of your product health consistently.
We see a 50% reduction in ad-hoc reporting, improved collaboration and alignment between product operations, risk, and regulatory teams, and product leaders rating they feel more confident making complex product decisions.
Product Health Check Terminology
Product Health Check Score = completing a 360 assessment of a product across the 6 Domains of Product Health
Domain = an area of product health and in Skyjed the 6 Domains are:
o Revenue
o Value
o Customer Experience
o Innovation
o Regulatory
o Sustainability
Driver = prompt for information, data, or rating
Product Health Check Score = an AI-generated rating of the health of your product from 0 to 100% and measurement of the health of your product with the distribution of ratings so you can see variances. Ratings are Very low, Low, Moderate, High, and Very high.