Building a product that satisfies users and hits revenue targets isn’t just about cranking out features, but rather, it’s about finding the sweet spot where customer needs, business goals, and technical realities meet. Market development professionals, product managers, and other business decision makers must balance users’ needs, business objectives, and technical feasibility in developing a market winning and profitable product. A few of the several critical factors that must be addressed along the way include:

• Define clear product vision and strategy: Identify the compelling “why” behind the product, tying it to measurable outcomes, while communicating the vision clearly across functional teams.
• Understand the customer: Continuously validate assumptions with first-hand customer feedback.
• Rely on Data-Informed Decision Making: Balance informed judgment and vision with actionable usage data gathered from actual user behavior.
• Focus on Outcomes vs. Outputs: Deliver customer and business value vs. measuring success based on volume of features released.

Stakeholders in the product development process collect data using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to help them make decisions about product strategy, feature prioritization, and user experience improvements.

To collect behavioral data using quantitative methods, several commercially available tools are available to track data points like feature usage frequency, user flows and drop-off points, and session duration and retention. Mechanisms can be incorporated into software to track button clicks, page views, feature activations, and conversion events. And more technical telemetry measures and usage logs can be incorporated to analyze crash reports and resource usage and paired with backend logs for server-side activity.

Attitudinal data can be captured using qualitative methods such as direct interviews with customers to understand pain points and learn how features are used in real life scenarios. This data can be captured in one-on-one sessions in person or via web meetings, focus groups, product beta programs, or other mechanisms. Online surveys can be used to capture satisfaction scores, specific feature feedback, and open-ended suggestions. Additional intel can be obtained via customer support and sales insights gathered from support tickets, chat transcripts, and/or sales feedback as well as online communities, public forums, and social media to spot trends, complaints, or praise.

While all these tools and methods for harvesting customer data can be helpful, they often come with several disadvantages or limitations that can cloud the strategic vision. For example, product usage data collection can overwhelm product managers with excessive, siloed data that is costly to manage, difficult to implement accurately, and lacks qualitative context, making it challenging to extract actionable insights that truly drive strategic decisions. Often it could be difficult to unravel siloed usage data housed in a CRM, coalesced with support tickets, or mired in chat threads. Finally, all these tools may be great for tracking usage, but not necessarily for understanding value. Product managers need to comprehend how this data correlates with customer success, retention, or revenue.

In the software world, a key metric for business stakeholders to understand customer preferences is to monitor and track license usage. The ability to precisely track license usage data and extract it into meaningful reports enable true data-driven decisions making based on clear insights into end-customer behavior. This invaluable data enables vendors to optimize existing licensing models, introduce new licensing approaches, and align business strategies with customer and market demands.

As a company solely invested in providing our global customers with innovative strategies to leverage new licensing-based monetization opportunities, we maintain ongoing communication with our customers and partners to spark new ideas and turn them into profitable endeavors. One of those ideas was to create a license reporting tool that would deliver the usage data discussed above and I am pleased that we have launched our CodeMeter License Reporting module. As part of our CodeMeter suite of licensing and protection solutions, CodeMeter License Reporting provides detailed insights into end customers’ license usage. With interactive dashboards and comprehensive reporting tools, the cloud-based platform allows for precise monitoring and optimization of software usage, empowering vendors to make informed, data-driven business decisions.

One of the strengths of CodeMeter License Reporting is its main dashboards, which provide clear reporting of specific aspects of license usage such as usage duration, number of accesses, and most used features. Additional dashboards are available to provide deeper insights into other usage aspects, such as failed access, geo-location, number of concurrent users, number of seats used per container, and others. These dashboards enable ISVs to identify usage patterns early, facilitate usage-based licensing models, and align marketing strategies based on data.

Another key feature of CodeMeter License Reporting is its easy implementation: The system can be seamlessly integrated into existing business processes without requiring extensive IT knowledge. This significantly reduces implementation efforts and provides quick access to usage reporting functions. ISVs can use a REST-API to pull raw data and integrate it into their own systems or build their own dashboards, ensuring they always have access to the relevant information they need.

There is much more to tell you about CodeMeter License Reporting, and you can now explore all the details on our dedicated product page: CodeMeter License Reporting – Turning License Usage Insights into Strategic Growth. You can also request a personalized demo to see firsthand how it delivers transparency into your software’s true reach.