My name is Bryan Mahoney and I'm the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer here at arfa.
On Product Launches and Important Metrics
So what do we think about when we're establishing V1 of a digital product? I think my answer now is going to be informed by 15 years of experience really building branded eCommerce. And at first, early on, it was all about the shopping cart experience, and the checkout experience, and making sure that they were unique and bespoke, and in some cases kind of over-designed.
Over time, repeating that same mistake of not necessarily building product with a really clear view of the events that we wanted to track, thinking semantically in fact led us to a place where we we start there. You know, what do we want to know or what do we need to know about a product that we're building that will lead us to believe that it is being successful - and most importantly, allow us to get signal on which direction we need to take it into next.
So you often hear in software development land, we work in iterations. Well, you want to have some signal. You want to have some data to help guide those those different iterations. So if I have traffic and I have sessions and I have conversions, then I can start thinking about things like, what is my Average Order Value? That is something that I want to understand from day one. Units per transaction is something that's pretty interesting. Expressed another way, how many things that I put into my basket before I ultimately checked out? How long did it take me to checkout? I think oftentimes we'll be focused on cart abandonment but we need to think about cart behavior too.
Some folks are gonna want to use the shopping cart as kind of a wishlist, so I might build my wishlist over a course of a week before I ultimately come back and check out. Maybe I'm looking at product reviews on different sites so a cart isn't necessarily abandoned after I leave that site for 20 minutes, but it's up to you to define what that experience is going to be like.
