Onboarding the wrong users leads to a faulty impression about user engagement and product success or failure. Although this is a rather simple insight, it can easily be missed due to its obvious nature.

When your target group is very broad it can easily happen that your user engagement KPIs don’t improve or most likely get worse. A too broad target group leads to a targeting problem for sales and marketing that in turn convince and onboard the wrong customers that churn fast, and negatively influence your KPIs downstream.

Define who a real user is by setting a engagment threshold

One quick fix is to define a threshold at which stage users really become customers. Another and more important approach is working together with sales and marketing to attract the right users in the first place (often easier said than done).

More importantly is to identify and understand who your super users are. These are the customers that have the highest engagement, and therefore receive the highest value from your product. You want to talk to them (all the time).

A user stack helps to diagnose and circle in on product problems

Taking this all together we can define our user stack with three different layers.

1. users that are using your product but haven’t yet met the threshold to become real users. Their churn rate is either a indicative of a value problem, onboarding problem or targeting problem. Their engagement data should either not be tracked or separately to avoid muddying up your KPIs.
2. real users make use of your product regularly and meet your threshold criteria. Their actions and engagement should be monitored closely. If your KPIs are lagging behind with this group, you have a value or UX problem. As they are already onboarded and crossed your engagement threshold.
3. super users receive the most value from your product. Their actions and engagement should not only be tracked quantitively but also qualitatively by regularly taking to them to understand future product developments. A hit to your KPIs here is a dangerous sign and needs your immediate attention as it signals a deep value problem.