Glossary of Product Management Terms

User story captures a user’s goal. For example, for a calendar app, a user story might be, “As a consultant, I want clients to pay when scheduling an event with me, so that I don’t have to chase them for payment.” This is told through the eyes of the user. A user story is higher level than a feature: it focuses on the user’s goal, which you can sastify with different features. For example, in a notes app, if a user has many notes and it’s hard to find what he wants and so he wants to organise them, that’s the user story. You could build tags or folders, which are two different features, two different ways, to address the need.

Activated user is one who achieves the primary goal of the product. For an e-commerce app, it would be placing an order. Secondary activities like navigating the categories, searching, filtering and reading reviews don’t count. An activated user achieves the main purpose of the product, like ordering in an e-commerce store, or sending a message in a messaging app.

Funnel: A funnel is a sequence of steps a user takes, such as: Website -> App store -> click Download -> open the app -> create an account -> add a product to the cart -> complete the checkout flow.

Analytics means recording how many users are performing an action or visiting a particular screen in an app.

User vs customer: For a B2B product, a customer is the company (like Airtel) and the user is each person within that company who uses the product.

Vanity metrics are irrelevant metrics used by people in a startup to mislead themselves and/or others about the current situation. For example, page views is a vanity metric. As another example, in an e-commerce site, you should track users who placed an order. Not all users, which is a vanity metric — it doesn’t correlate to actual business.

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