The Product Telemetry Checklist
Use this when a team is about to argue about how users behave in a workflow the product could already be counting. Worked in “Instrument Before Arguing.”
The Product Telemetry Checklist, part one: what to instrument.
| Signal | Instrumented? | Where it lives and who can read it |
|---|---|---|
Task start and completion |
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Time on task |
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Abandonment point |
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Errors and validation failures |
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Repetition |
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Backtracking |
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Exports and copy-outs (leaving the application to finish the job) |
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Role and practice (or site) dimensions |
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Workflow sequences |
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The downstream outcome the workflow exists to produce |
The Product Telemetry Checklist, part two: what telemetry can’t answer.
| Question telemetry can’t answer | How we’ll find out instead |
|---|---|
Why the user did it |
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What the user intended |
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Work done outside the product |
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Whether the right thing happened |
Part one tells you what users did; part two lists the reasons to go watch them anyway. An empty exports row means you’re missing the signal that most often shows the product failing to finish the job.