What's the north star metric for Google Calendar?

Google's aim is to organize the world's information to make it accessible to users. Google calendar is part of the suite of applications that Google provides to both consumers and enterprise users to achieve this goal. The calendar app helps users organizes their time to achieve the most out of it. 

Clarifying questions

1. Calendar is available for enterprise as part of the g-suite and free version for the general public. Are we looking to define the north start for the free version as the enterprise users are bound to use the calendar as that allows them to see everyone else's calendar in the org? - yes

Google Calendar is a fairly established product with wide market adoption. It is highly integrated with other Google applications like email, chat and meet. At this stage of the product, the company would be more concerned with engaging and retaining its existing customers.

Let's look at the typical use case for Google calendar and try to define the important metrics around engagement and retention. We'll then go on to gauge their usefulness and arrive at the north star.

There are majorly two types of users from the perspective of the calendar app, those who set up and attend the meeting and those who have to just attend the meetings at the scheduled time. 

User Journey

1. User opens the calendar app

2. Looks at the availability of the time slots that he wishes to schedule a meeting with

3. Adjusts the setting of the meeting if required, adds an agenda and sends out the invite

4. user RSVP a meeting request

5. Joins the meeting

7. Sends out MOMs/AIs as defined during the meeting using the invite on the calendar

 Let's look at the important metrics across all these steps

As established earlier we have focused on Engagement and Retention as this product has matured. 

The most important metics to track are the number of users using the app and gaining value so I would look at 

1. Number of calendar sessions per day per user

2. Number of users creating a meeting per week

3. Number of users with any scheduled meeting per week

4. Number of meetings created per user per week

The most valuable aspect of the calendar would be successfully attending a meeting but that could be difficult to accurately track so the North start that I would like to track would be:

1. Number of users creating a meeting week

Guard rail metrics - 1.  Number of meetings created per user per week

2. Number of users with any meeting scheduled per week

I would also like to draw on the kind of experience a user has while using the Calendar by the type of interaction that they have. For instance, if they have to cancel/decline/reschedule/edit a lot of meeting it would tell us that users are not able to get the desired output in 1 go. Although these would be secondary metrics

1. Number of meetings declined per user per week

2. % of all meetings edited 

Question

What's the northstar metric for Google Calendar?

Clarifying questions?

When you say Google Calendar, I think of the free service that comes with my Google account as well as the paid version that comes as part of G-Suite.  Would you like me to focus on a segment?  Let’s assume that we focus on the free service and not g-suite.

When I think of google calendar there are multiple parts like appointment setting, scheduling, multi-party meetings, should I drill into a specific part or think of the service holistically?  Please think of the service holistically.

Describe the product

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds information and make it accessible and useful.  To that end Google calendar is a means of organizing the worlds time and scheduling, one user at a time.  That we can see our organized time on phones, computers, push notifications and reminded by Google assistant – this makes it accessible and useful.    

User Journey

1.       User gets a google account (likely for email)

2.       User opens calendar

3.       User sets a calendar item

4.       User invites others to calendar

5.       User attends meeting

Attach metrics to each step of the user journey

Note a few metrics I did not talk about. monetization and referral.  Monetization for Calendar seems to be indirect.  There are not any ads in Calendar so  its more about having users in the eco system which leads them to other monetization moments for Google.  I also didn’t talk about referral – it is likely that when you invite someone to a meeting it may be a form of referral.  But again, I could be a solitary calendar user so this seems like a supporting metric. 

Summary

I think the primary metrics for Calendar is like a funnel

% of Google users that open calendar

% of users that set a calendar appointment

Number of calendar items set per user

If you time sequence these metrics, then you can then see health and growth. 

If I had to pick a single NorthStar metric I think the % of users that set a calendar appointment is it. 

This shows engagement, if time sequenced it show retention, it can be sliced by user activity, demographics, geography and shows engagement and retention by user segment.  I think it is better than % of users that open calendar because opening is different than using.  I think it is better than items per users because that metric only shows usage, not changes to the number of users.  You could have that number of calendar items per user spike while the total number of users falls and not know that the ecosystem was collapsing.