One of the best ways to understand your product usage is to analyze which features are being used.
Doing this for every major feature in your product will create an "audit" of the features.
How to define a Feature Audit
The idea is to take your current product, analyze feature usage and plot it on a graph:
Horizontal axis: Popularity is the ratio of the number of people who used this feature to the number of people who used any feature (not only the ones selected in this report)
Vertical axis: Frequency is the ratio of the number of days an event was performed, divided by the number of days any events were performed in your product
In this way, you'll obtain a map of your features
Why Feature Audit
Features Audit is an easy but powerful product management tool to map your features. It helps discover the features to develop or improve and focus on that matter.
In a feature audit, you choose how to treat a feature with limited adoption. You have four options:
1️⃣ You can remove the feature from your product
2️⃣ You can increase the adoption rate to make sure more customers discover a feature
3️⃣ You can increase the frequency with which customers are using the feature
4️⃣ You can improve the feature
Where to Focus
All the features that are in the top right section of the graph should be your priority. These are features that all users are using, meaning they see the value of the feature
These features are the core reasons why customers love your product. If you can make improvements here, it will delight all of your customers.
Yet, if you make an improvement that users don't like is pretty bad news.
So, make these features better if you can, but do so with great caution. Test changes here in a small bucket of users first - say 5% of users or less, before shipping to all.
Bottom left features are not your best ones: if you want to improve them make sure they move to the top right, otherwise you are losing your precious time on something that few customers use only once in a while.
How to exploit the Feature Audit
The Feature Audit template could help you understand which are the best "places" where to run experiments.
If a feature has a high frequency of use but low popularity probably is very useful for a certain kind of persona and less for another. What you have to do in this case is to understand which type of your users (industry, role etc) are enjoying that feature and then propose it to similar profiles.
If a feature has high popularity and medium / low frequency then probably it's something that is useful for many people but not crucial. If you are not sure which use cases could appeal to certain new users, push them towards a high popularity one: you'll have a good chance they find it useful.
To do so, use some messaging (in-app messages, emails etc) and see if your hypothesis were correct by checking if they actually started using that certain feature. Running such experiments will help you to get to know your customer's preferences.
Make sure to explain well the value of the feature: it might seem obvious to you but most of the times it's not for someone who sees your product for the first time.
How to use the Features Audit template
To obtain an overview of your features all you have to do is to pick the events corresponding to the features you want to analyze and select a specific audience if you wish to.