Getting Started for Product Teams

Welcome to Fullstory! This guide will show you how to leverage deep user insights to build a data-driven product strategy, validate your decisions, and ultimately ship features that customers love.

Here are the key learnings we'll explore:

• Uncover hidden friction and opportunities: See your product through your users' eyes to discover high-impact friction points and opportunities for improvement that you didn't know existed.
• Quantify the impact of any issue: Zoom out to instantly know how many users are affected by a bug or usability problem, giving you the data to make informed prioritization decisions with engineering.
• Measure feature adoption and success: Go beyond initial clicks to understand if new features are truly resonating with users and driving long-term value and engagement.
• Prioritize with confidence: Move beyond assumptions by using real user behavior to inform your product roadmap and validate what to build next.

Uncover Hidden Friction and Opportunities

As a product manager, you can't fix what you can't see. The most valuable opportunities are often hidden in your users' experiences—the small hesitations, confused clicks, and unexpected workflows that analytics dashboards alone can't show you.

Your journey begins by seeing your product through your users' eyes.

See the full user experience

While quantitative data tells you what happened, session replays show you why. By watching sessions, you can move beyond simple click tracking to understand the full context of the user experience.

• Host a watch party: Get your team together to watch key sessions. It's a powerful way to build empathy, collaborate on solutions, and generate user-centric ideas.
• Analyze user paths with Journeys: Discover the real paths users take through your product. Answering the question "Why are users going from here to there?" can reveal desire paths and unlock new opportunities.
• Start with a template: Use a pre-built Frustration Signals Dashboard to automatically surface sessions containing signals like Rage Clicks, Dead Clicks, and page refreshes.

Once you find an issue, you can share it with your team in Jira or Slack with a single click, bringing the qualitative evidence directly into your engineering workflow.

Quantify the Impact of Any Issue

You've found an insightful session replay showing a user struggling. The next critical question is always: "How many other people is this affecting?"

Answering this question turns a single observation into a powerful business case. It's the difference between saying "I saw a user have a problem" and telling your engineering counterparts, "This bug has impacted 750 customers in the last 24 hours."

This is how you investigate error events from a single session to understand the full scope of an issue.

1. While viewing a session, locate a frustration signal or error in the event stream.
2. Click the event to open the search context menu.
3. Fullstory instantly shows you a metric for how many other users have experienced the same event.
4. Click the metric to see all other affected users.

Many PMs start by using Fullstory reactively to troubleshoot issues. By quantifying the impact, you can confidently align with engineering and prioritize the fixes that matter most.

Measure Feature Adoption and Success

You've launched a new feature. Success isn't just about the initial announcement or the first few clicks; it's about whether the feature delivers long-term value and drives engagement.

Go beyond surface-level metrics to understand if your features are truly resonating.

• Build a Feature Adoption Dashboard: Create a dashboard to track not just initial usage, but how often users return to the feature and what they do afterward.
• Validate your experiments: Integrate with A/B testing tools like Optimizely. Create a segment for each test variant in Fullstory to watch sessions and see why one version is performing better than the other.
• Get proactive with alerts: Set alerts to notify you of significant dips or spikes in feature usage so you can investigate immediately.

Watch this video to learn more about measuring feature adoption.

Prioritize with Confidence

Your roadmap shouldn't be built on assumptions. With Fullstory, you can use real user behavior to validate your hypotheses and decide what to build next with confidence. Great product strategy starts with identifying the most impactful problems to solve.

Identify drop-off with Funnels

Build a funnel for a key workflow (like onboarding or checkout). The biggest drop-off point is often your highest-priority area for improvement. Click into the drop-off step to watch sessions and understand the friction.

Here's how to use Funnels to find the most impactful problem to solve in a key workflow:

1. Click Create > Funnel.
2. Define the key steps in your user flow. For an e-commerce site, this might be:
   • Step 1: Visited Product Detail Page
   • Step 2: Clicked "Add to Cart" button
   • Step 3: Clicked "Checkout" button
3. Scroll down and take a look at the Funnel details. Use the bar chart to identify the biggest drop-off point. This is your highest-priority area for investigation. Hover over the translucent blue area to view the drop off details from the previous step.
4. Click Watch sessions to instantly jump into the session replays for only the users who abandoned the flow at that exact step. Now you can see why they may have left.

Find unmet needs with Segments

Create segments of users who show frustration but don't convert. These are often your most motivated users who are struggling to find a solution—a prime audience for a new feature or product update.

Prove the impact with data

Use custom or pre-built dashboards and metrics you create to build a data-driven case for your roadmap decisions and share the "why" with stakeholders.

Watch this video for more tips on using Fullstory for roadmap planning.