Ask HN: How non-technical people track KPIs or other Product data?
I started working on a set of problems related to how Teams work with data from their own Business. Like, tracking key Metrics - User signup, or Retention, or Activity on different parts of App. Marketplace teams might want to know how many interactions are happening between Supply and Demand side. E-commerce teams might want to know Items are being sold or not. Which steps of Checkout (or similar) process are people dropping out etc.
I understand there are analytics tools to get these visually available to teams, but they usually all need Engineer team to setup. I am curious how non-technical people get more and more detailed data on a regular basis on their own. In my previous companies, I usually was always helping Sales, Marketing, Support or Analysis teams to setup Dashboards. So it was either me or some other Engineer helping out, but the teams were not empowered themselves to learn and figure out on their own.
As a Startup scales up, it becomes a tough challenge for all new Employees to understand what are the core Business data in the company. What to measure or keep in mind? And how to be curious and ask more important questions about the Business? All of these are very simple for the Developer, but perhaps a lot of struggle for their non-coding colleagues.
I am genuinely curious about what the wide world does since my experiences are limited to the 10 or so companies I've worked with. I have surely seen the struggles in startups from US, Europe to India but as I am building my product, I also need to understand what are others doing.
Thank you for any pointers, thank you for helping out a trying entrepreneur.
Kind regards, Sumit Datta