What is the most important metric for Google Docs and why?

Context setting : Google Docs is a web based application that helps people to create documents, edit and collaborate in real time. It is part of G-Suite apps. Value add to the users is  to create documents through real time collaboration and ultimately help organise their digital assets. Given the user segments for Google Docs are D2C and Business users, I would like to proceed with Business User Segments. The rationale being there is monetisation lens to Business User Vs D2C (freemium model).

 

Goal: When a business subscribes to a pricing plan, the Google workspace containing Google Docs plus more is packaged within. However specific to Google Docs, the business goal is to measure the engagement and I shall explain through User Journey below:

Also just a note that I will be addressing B2B as Accounts Vs Users.

 

Awareness : Given the maturity of the product, I may not focus on Awareness and channel performance at this stage.

 

Acquisition : When a business account subscribes to a certain plan, users are signed up to apps in Google Workspace, therefore acquisition at Google Workspace can be equated to Google Docs and the metric already exists. There are couple of other ways that Acquisition can be driven and will state in the Engagement step.

 

Engagement : This is an important metric that needs to be measured, as this can indicate the real success of Google Docs and the value add to Business users coming to fruition. Hypothetically, if this is measured at Google Suite level as X, the aim is to X/10 or 10% should be seen at Google Docs.

 

Keys ones: 

Number of documents being created per Account on a Daily, Weekly and Monthly Basis

 

Number of collaborators engaging per document

 

Number of Shares of the documents with team members (within organisation) weekly, Daily and Monthly. This viral loop will help to acquire more users (More Acquisition) and result in better Engagement.

 

Number of documents being converted for interoperability with Microsoft Office Files. This will help to aim to Switch users from Microsoft Office to G-Suite apps. More Acquisition.

 

Retention

Accounts being subscribed to Google workspace is by default retained regardless of the usage of the Google Docs or not, meaning the revenue is retained. Retention as a business metric may not be rightly applicable here.

Monetisation : There may not be a directly proportional increase in revenue due to specifically using Google Docs. As mentioned in the earlier step, Business users are subscribed to the bundled package of Google Workspace. However it needs to be measured if Accounts are being switched from Microsoft Office to G-Suite AND if more users collaborating on documents requires Accounts to upgrade the subscription plan resulting in more Monetisation.

Clarification questions / Assumptions

1. I am assuming the question refers to the docs product (creating, editing, deleting and sharing documents of several types- Text editor, Spreadsheet, Presentations) and NOT to the drive that holds them

Product description

A platform to create and edit documents in collaboration with distanced users.

 

Product GOAL
corresponding to Google general mission, Google Docs goal is to organize user’s data and documents in one place, allow collaboration between many distnaced  users while working on a single doc

 

Segments

1. According to use type: private use, academic use, for work.
    
2. According to document's permissions: creator, editor, viewer - focus on all
    
3. According to account type: private accounts and business accounts - I will focus on private accounts only

 

 

Metrics:

1. COLLABORATION:
   1. % of shared documents / all created documents (permission was given to more than 1 user, other than creator)
   2. # of editors to a single doc
   3. # of viewers to a single doc
2. ENGAGEMENT
   1. Per user:
      1. Avg # documents created by the user per user
      2. Avg # documents shared by the user per user
      3. Avg # documents shared with the user per user (view/edit)
      4. % of documents the user had viewed / total documents he has view permissions
      5. % of documents the user had edited / total documents he has edit permissions
   2. Per document:
      1. # of documents created during the during the last month
      2. # of documents shared with others during the during the last month
      3. # of documents viewed during the during the last month
      4. # of documents commented during the during the last month (got comments)
      5. # of documents modified during the during the last month
      6. Avg # of actions performed on a document during the last month
      7. # of returns to an old “dormant” document
3. REFERAL 
   1. # of share invitations sent per document
   2. Avg # of contributors (including creators) per document

 

Metric Prioritization

Most important KPI for Google Docs is the engagement to it, since it includes the collaboration and accessibility factors in it and increase in engagement reflects the success of the feature and fulfillment of its goal, I will focus on engagement metrics (section 3), and prioritize them as follow: 1.4, 1.5, 1.2, 1.1, 1.3 - These metrics also cover the “referral” goal.

 

Summary

to summarize- Google Docs is a platform for creating and editing documents,
Its main goal is to allow collaborative work among several distanced users on a single document and easy access anywhere anytime.
The main metrics I would focus on are engagements metrics that measure users engagement and activity with the documents

 

What does Google Docs do? Google Docs are used to create text documents from your browser.

 

 

 

What user problem is it solving?

 

Users do not have to download any software to create text documents, they can create text documents in the browser, and these documents become easily accessible and shareable as they are available on the internet.

 

 

Why do users create text documents? Users create text documents so that they or some other users can go through the text document.
If a doc is created and is not used by a user after that then that doc is not of any use, users have not written enough important things into that doc that they have to revisit it again.

 

User Journey

 

• User lands on Google doc Home Page

• User search older doc or user creates new doc

• User writes the text, or update it

• User shares the doc, if they want to

• Users receive an email that they the doc is shared with them

• Users can do real time collaboration like typing, commenting etc, if required

 

What does Google Docs do? Google Docs are used to create text documents from your browser.

 

 

 

What user problem is it solving?

 

Users do not have to download any software to create text documents, they can create text documents in the browser, and these documents become easily accessible and shareable as they are available on the internet.

 

 

Why do users create text documents? Users create text documents so that they or some other users can go through the text document.
If a doc is created and is not used by a user after that then that doc is not of any use, users have not written enough important things into that doc that they have to revisit it again.

 

User Journey

 

• User lands on Google doc Home Page

• User search older doc or user creates new doc

• User writes the text, or update it

• User shares the doc, if they want to

• Users receive an email that they the doc is shared with them

• Users can do real time collaboration like typing, commenting etc, if required

Clarify:

• Tool to create word docs

• Users can edit, share, contribute and collaborate

 

Goals

• Company Mission Alignment: Google's corporate mission is to organize the world's information. With that in mind, the company has integrated some of its organizational, collaborative  and search capabilities into Google Docs

• Docs goal would be to allow user to share and collaborate written information and it aligns with google’s overall mission

 

Stakeholders

• Users: Can create, edit, share docs and collaborate

• Google: Part of google overall ecosystem, increased engagement strengthen the ecosystem and can be later monetized using B2B offerings or ads

Metrics:

I feel adoption and engagement will be the 2 most important class of metrics here since the goal is to increase engagement and have a bigger user base as well

Adoption:

• # of total users

• # of total docs created

 

Engagement:

• Dau/WAU/MAU

• # of new docs created per user/week

• # of docs touched/user/Week (create/edit/comment/read)

• # Of total collaborations per week or month (# of people contributing to a doc, we will take a universal sum)

Retention:

• % of repeat users per week

 

Prioritize and summary:

As the purpose of google docs is to strengthen google’s overall ecosystem and also provide people a way to collaborate and organize information, I feel the engagement metrics are the most important. Among engagement metrics, I would like to focus on DAU/WAU/MAU as it represents the number of users that actively interact with the product on a regular basis

 

Another important metric is the # of total collaborations as it represents the collaborative aspect of the product, more cross-user collaboration leads to better engagement in the longer term due to the network effect

• Goal of google docs is to allow users to create documents from any mobile or desktop device in the world, as long as they have access to internet. The product is particularly good for collaboration, and because the docs are stored in the cloud, users don't need to worry about losing information. Since its a fairly known product i'm not going to spend long describing it.

• In terms of the users that use google docs, there’s a few interesting groups to think about:

  • Average private user

  • Businesses [corporations] may use it as an alternative to microsoft office

    • Within enterprise, there are several different verticals

  • Education

    • Teachers and students

  • Governments, non-profits

  • Drilling down, within each group there would be:

    • People who are producing a document

    • People who are invited as collaborators to a doc

    • People who are viewers of a document

• How does google docs provide value to these users?

  • For the avg private individual it’s free with a google acct

  • Don’t need to worry about losing data

  • Can access docs from any device with an internet connection

  • Great for collaboration

• Alignment to Google strategy & business value that docs provides Google:  Google’s product strategy is to offer its users a suite of products that keep them in the Google ecosystem. Even if a product doesn’t generate much revenue for them, if it keeps the user in the google ecosystem that’s great because a) it increases the likelihood that they will go on to use other google products over time b) it increases the likelihood that their friends will join the google ecosystem and c) it gives google more information about the user.

• Google docs is not something google monetizes directly for most users (for B2b and education they likely have some monetization in place) but for the average private user, it's mostly a way to lure them into the google ecosystem

• Let’s use this context to think about what business metrics Google would care most about for docs:

  • Adoption of google docs is really important for Google in terms of  bringing more  people into the ecosystem.

  • Engagement is a valuable metric, however given that they are not serving ads in google docs and directly monetizing of engagement, I dont think its as important for google docs and it may be for google search for example or for FB newsfeed

  • I think referral is very important because again it comes into the play of getting more people into the ecosystem.

  • Awareness: google already has great brand awareness so it's not something i would focus on a lot.

 

For the purpose of this question, I’m going to focus on adoption as the high level business metric that’s most important to track. While referrals are important to growing the ecosystem, if the # of referrals is high, I think that would lead to higher adoption metrics too. Also, referrals is just one solution to growing the ecosystem; I think there are other ways that the ecosystem could be grown, so I would not focus on referrals as the leading metric domain.

Now, in order to help us choose precise metrics, I’m going to think about different actions a user would take from start to end as they use google docs.

The journey will differ if you’re a content creator, invited as a collaborator, or invited to view, so I may sketch out different actions/journeys for each

• Starting with the content creator, the user will one day decide that she needs to produce a doc

• She will decide which doc producing software to use, she could land up on google, could decide to use text edit or msft word

• If she decides to use google she’ll navigate to the docs homepage, and she can get their through a variety of mechanisms (via her gmail, via typing in the URL directly etc.)

• At the homepage, she’ll choose to create a new document

  • This is the user journey stage where the actions would differ based on creator, collaborator, viewer

  • Collaborators would be opening docs shared with them by others, either via the email link, or by clicking on the file in the shared with folder

  • Viewers would do something similar

• The person would then add contents to the doc

  • If you’re a collaborator or viewer you would mostly be adding comments and maybe modifying some parts of writing with the track changes feature enabled

• Once the doc creator is done with creating it, he may choose to share with people or just print out the file/export it to another format to share

   

Would you largely agree with this? Anything I’ve missed?

Metrics

1. % of people with a google email address that have created at least one doc

   1. cons: doesn’t tell us anything about active usage

2. % of people with a google email address that have either created or commented or viewed least one doc

   1. Cons: same as for #1

3. # of docs created per day

   1. Cons: could have a lot of small meaningless docs created by one person -- if a spam bot was just churning out a bunch of new docs, it would influence this metric

4. % of google users that have created a doc that day

   1. Cons: doesn’t include other forms of engagement with docs such as adding comments, reading editing etc.

5. % of google users that have read or edited a doc that day/week (includes all doc creations/edit, comments & reads)

6. Metrics that indicate growth of ecosystem

   1. Number of users who engaged with a doc for the first time in a given week

   2. Number of people docs were shared to in a given week

   3. Increase in % of people with a google email address that have created at least one doc

       

Chosen metric: % of google users that have read or edited a doc that week  (includes all doc creations/edit, comments & reads)

 

• By looking at change in % over time, you can gauge growth. Things like # of people docs are shared with will influence and be reflected in this metric.

• Helps us figure out the # of active users, which i think is more valuable than just the number of users, bc if google is trying to convert these users to use other google products, active users are much more likely to go on to use other google products and to invite their friends & fam into the google ecosystem

• Limitations

  • Doesn’t help you understand how much the google ecosystem is growing.. I.e if people are unhappy with google and they choose to deactivate their google accounts, this % would increase, but its not actually reflecting positive news for google

    • Thinking about this, maybe we want the metric to be # of users that have read or edited a doc that week instead of ‘% of google users’?

  • How do you define ‘read’? Do users need to click on/scroll through a page? There could be people who accidentally open a tab with google doc open (I know I do this very often when going through tabs)

Company Mission

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and empower users to make smart decisions and to achieve more.

What is Google Docs? 

• Word processing in the cloud to create and share ideas

Who might use Google Docs? (User segments)

• Market segment: Individual / Freemium vs Business / Premium Ecosystem

• More importantly by User Roles:

  • Creator

  • Co-Creator, Editor

  • Viewer, Other audience

Why Google Doc over its competitors? 

• Simplicity (reliable), Familiar, Powerful, Affordable

• Ecosystem, Organization (Google Workspace, etc.)

Product Lifecycle + Goals

• Mature / Risk of Declining - Emerging competitors like Evernote and Notion

• Growth in new markets and new demographics (e.g.students and remote learning)

• Retain or resurrect existing users

• Usage patterns: Daily, Weekly, Monthly all possible, etc.

Metrics

• Focus: 1st Experience within 3 months, Time to Value

• By User Segments

 

 

Product + Health Metrics

Summary

 

• Product North Star Metrics:

  • How often users are sharing or commenting on Google Doc - Network effect

  • This ties nicely back to the product value proposition of efficient collaborative information sharing = )

• Note

  • Private Docs creation will also bring user back; they are more likely to use Docs for group collaboration later - Basic functionality that’s already optimized

Describe the product- Google docs help in saving, editing, deleting and sharing the data to the multiple users at a time.

Clarifications/Assumptions

1.      What defines the most critical and successful feature for Google docs defines the success of the product when other alternatives are available in the market?

Assuming: Overall value proposition of the product

2.      Is it compatible to all the OS or there are any exceptions?

Assuming it is compatible with all the devices and OS

Value Proposition

1.      Ability to share the data while keeping the doc at one place

2.      Ability to add, delete or update the doc

3.      Ability to access the doc from anywhere even in case you want to access with different device

4.      Access to the doc can be controlled

5.      No need to manage specific hardware like pen drives etc to manage the data

6.      Data is saved in cloud

7.      Full Screen View for Distraction-Free Writing.

8.      Table of Contents Tool for Organizing Documents.

9.      Add-Ons for Grammar Checks.

10.   Voice Typing for Easier Thought Processing.

11.   Bookmarks for Navigating Documents.

12.   Offline Mode for Writing Anywhere.

13.   Page Numbers for Easy Formatting.

14.   Collaboration becomes easy. People can comment, share the doc in a hassle-free manner

Disadvantage

1.      It has still not all the advance features like word document

2.      It cannot be used a power point presentation

Goal of the product

To increase the user engagement and increase the customer base as the google docs does not directly generate the revenue but helps the users to inadvertently click on the other services or the online ads that generates the models.

User Journey

User creates a distinct gmail ID to access the google docs as a feature, login to the product, creates a new document write it and save it.

User users an existing gmail ID to access the google docs as a feature, login to the product, opens an existing save document write it and save it.

User shares the document to multiple other users to make collaboration and update the content.

Other users add text, comments, pictures, Gify etc and save it

Primary users or the extended shared users can add number of sheets/pages to continue adding the content

As google docs is a content driven product so I would like list the metrics on the similar lines which helps in measuring the goal of the product

1.      Average number of people and % increase in the users who is using the google doc for the first time

2.      The average number of documents generated by the users each day.

3.      % Increase in the number of documents generated by the users periodically

4.      Average size of the document created by the users. Heft content like pictures, gipyhs, may increase the size of the file and the user need to spend time and efforts on it.

5.      Average number of times users make the changes in a document and %increase on it

6.      Average number of times the same document is being shared to the new users. % increase on it periodically

7.      Average number of new documents being shared to the same user group. % Increase on it periodically

8.      How frequently the user is using google docs and the average amount of  time being spent by the user while working on it

9.      CTR, user hits the google doc and came out of it. Click in and Click out rate

10.   Number of documents being deleted by the users periodically to eliminate the data foot print.

11.   Number of hits the user gives to google docs just to view the content in google docs

Evaluation

I would like to asses the metrics on the Reach and impact as how many numbers of users have been using this feature and how much impact it has created. I would like to asses the same based on the customer adoption, activation , engagement and retention metrics mentioned above. As only one segment might not givde the comprehensve picture. Monetisation I will not include as google docs does directly generates the rev

Step 1: Ask clarifying questions to narrow down the scope

1) Do you want me to consider any particular company objective in mind while evaluating the most important metrics for Google docs or is it something that i can assume?

2) Are we considering Google docs on the mobile app or the web (or is it something that you'd like me to assume as well)?

Step 2: Explain your understanding of the product

Google docs is a product by Google that is used for creating, editing and sharing documents with people. It is used for real-time collaboration either at work or for personal work as well.

Users can create document on google docs, they can edit, delete, add content in the document in the form of images, videos, text and links. Share the document with anyone within the network as well as with people outside the network. All content of the document(google doc) gets automatically saved.

Google docs is the mostly widely used online document sharing and collaborating tool in the world, the product is however still growing as google is launching new updates of google docs which has a lot of unique features.

Google docs has usage based pricing, it has a free plan and a paid plan depending on the usage. If someone has a very heavy usage then they would be going for a paid plan. There are different parts of a paid plan as well

There are 2 main types of users who will be using Google docs which are as follows

1) Individuals- Individuals can use google docs to create content which they can save and use it for future purposes. This user group can be further divided into business users, students and other kinds of users

2) Teams-Teams use google docs extensively to share content and documents with everyone within the team.

 

Step 3: List down the user actions

1) User opens google docs

2)User can create and compose content. Can put images, videos, articles as content

3) Content will be saved automatically

4) Content can be edited, deleted in real-time

5) Can share the content with different users as well

 

Step 4: List down the metrics that are associated with each phase of the user journey

1) Activation

Number of users who have download google docs on their phone

Number of news users who have created atleast 1 document

Number of news users who have shared the content with at least 1 other user

2) Engagement

Avg time spent using google docs on a daily basis

Total number of documents created, edited and shared per user using google docs on a daily and weekly basis

% of users who have created documents using google docs

Avg number of users a document is shared to per 1000 people on a daily/weekly/monthly basis

3)Retention

% of users who use google docs on a daily/weekly/monthly basis (DAU, WAU, MAU)

% of users who are using google docs even after 6 months

4) Monetization

% of user conversion from free version of google docs to google suite.

 

Step 5: Evaluate and prioritise the metrics

The metrics we have listed in step 4 we will evaluate them on the basis of Impact to end user, Relevance to company's goal and mission, Effort required to collect the metrics

Since we are considering the most important metric it should be one that is tied towards the goal/mission of google docs, it should also provide value to the end user/customer and it should also be broad in nature.

Monetisation metrics provides value to the company but no value to the end user thus we don't include those metrics. User adoption metric is not tied to the end goal of the product which is to create and share documents and to improve user/team collaboration.

Thus now we are left with user engagement and retention metrics.As a PM the retention metrics (DAU, WAU and MAU) and % of users who continue using google docs after 6 months is not very broad in nature hence we wont consider them as it might be possible that even if users are using google docs on a daily basis they might be using it just for creating documents for their own seves, this doesn't show/cover the collaboration part. Retention metrics is removed as well as its not alignedto main goal of product which is to increase user engagement and related to cross collaboration

Considering user engagement metrics now avg time spend per session on google docs is a very small metric thus not fit for being the north star metric, Average number of users a document is shared to on a daily basis is a good metric because it drives user engagement, provides value to the customer, is aligned to company's mission as well and will be our  second secondary metric for this example.

Thus total number of documents created and shared per user using google docs on a monthly basis is a very broad metric, it is aligned to company's vision, associated to user engagement and also provides value to end user, thus it is a good primary metric to measure the succcess of Google docs.

Average number of users a document is shared to on a daily basis is the secondary metric that we will be considering to evaluate the success of google docs

Google Docs allows users to create documents and share those documents with other users within the same org or outside cases so that they can work together collaboratively.  The creator can give edit, comment or only read access to other users. The editor can comment and edit the doc where as users with read or comment can only do the respective action. 

 

Goal of Google Docs : To allow users to share documents with others and work on documents, presentations, diagrams etc collaboratively so that they can create great documents which can help increase their productivity. 

 

Assumption 

 

We will stick to Google Docs for this question. 

 

User Journey

 

User goes to Google Drive —> creates a new document (google docs) —> adds content —> shares with other users or groups with specific permissions using public link or using the share button and adding their email addresses —> other users comment or read or write to those docs depending on permissions they have

 

Secondary Actions 

 

Publish documents to the web

Compare documents 

 

Metrics 

 

Usage 

 

Number of documents created per user per month

Number of documents shared per user per month

Average number of shares per document per user  

Number of shares per user per month

% of docs where a public link was created and copied to share doc.

Number of shares outside of same org in case of Google Suite users

% of shared docs opened 

% of shared docs opened via public link

% of shared docs edited or commented on 

Average number of people working on a doc at a time

 

Number of documents published to the web per user per month

Number of times compare documents feature was used per user per month

 

Number of docs imported into google suite and converted to Google Docs

% of docs shared to new users 

Cloud storage used per user (more Cloud storage used would make users upgrade to paid storage plan ; same case in case of Google Business Suite users) 

 

Retention

 

DAU WAU and MAU

Time spent per user per month on Docs creating or reading documents on Google Docs

Number of sessions per month on documents created using Google Docs

 

Prioritization 

 

Based on the impact to the goal, i think i would consider the number of documents created and shared per user per month and average number of people working on a doc at one time as the most important metric since that indicates it is helping users collaborate and work together. 

 

To answer this question, I will go through the following steps:

1. what is the product
2. who are the users
3. what are the features of this product
4. Metrics

• Instant share
• Collaboration
• accessible on any device
• Support all documents type

• Slow typing speed
• unable to figure out how to make edits like
  • add/remove space
  • add bullets
  • wrap text around an image