If you were the PM in charge of the Google Pixel's camera app, how would you measure your success?

Setting the Stage

Let's briefly establish a common definition of what the Pixel Camera app is and how users use it. It is an app that comes preloaded onto the phone and let's users take both photos and videos using their phones camera. Videos can include sound as well. There are a variety of different filters and quality levels users can apply to whatever they are capturing. These photos and videos can then be saved to the user's phone for later access via another app.

In order to set the stage for this problem I think its important to examine this product in the context of it's company and it's mission. In this case Google's mission statement is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. The Google Pixel Camera lends itself to that mission statement by allowing users to take snapshots of the world that they may access at a later point. 

Metrics

Let's brainstorm some success metrics by looking at the different steps in the customer lifecycle:

• Awareness: We're going to ignore this. The Google Pixel Camera app comes as one of several pre-installed apps on users' devices so awareness won't be a challenge for us.
• Adoption: % of users who have captured media in the last week
• Engagement: Average number of media captured per user / week, % of users who have captured media 3+ seperate times / week
• Retention: % of users who have captured media 3+ separate times last week who have also done the same this week
• Monetization: This is more of a baseline feature in all smart phones which provides a lot of utility to users. Not meant for monetization so will ignore this.
• Referral: Going to ignore this, as it primarily relates to raising awareness amongst other users which we've mentioned above isn't a priority.

Furthermore, the metric above is a better indicator of success than the average number of media captured per user / week because people will often take several photos of the same thing at one time but it is really more of a single use case. For example, "Oh I was blinking in that one, let's take another".

We're choosing to measure the % of users and not the absolute number because the absolute number would ebb and flow with the total number of users. For example, our KPI could be increasing even though less and less users are finding the camera helpful on a relative basis, or the converse of that as well.

Downsides

While I'm confident in our chosen metric's ability to measure success, no metric is perfect so it's always worth exploring and calling out any potential downsides.

Our chosen metric is fairly high level and doesn't give us any granularity into the actual use cases of our users. We don't know if they are taking pictures of their friends and family, pets, sunsets, selfies, or who knows!? We don't. Also, we don't know the distribution of photos vs videos. Are their power users who take a ton of photos, maybe even some professionally captured via our device?

Our metric doesn't give us insight into the quality of the camera capturing experience. Are users finding it easy to capture content? Is the camera quality good enough? Are they taking more photos because it's hard to frame their subject or are their photos are coming out blurry due to our app?

Summary

The Pixel Camera app helps Google organize the worlds information and make it universally useful and accessible by letting users take photo and video snapshots of the world around them. We'll measure the success of this app by monitoring the percentage of users who have captured media 3+ separate times / week.