From good to great: how product managers drive optimization and enhance product success

You’ve launched your product, found product-market fit, and started bringing customers through the door. Huge win. 🎉 But don’t pop the champagne just yet—you’re only getting started.

Products aren’t static. They’re living, breathing, ever-evolving organisms. And real success? It comes from doing more than just shipping something good—it’s about making what’s good even better. That’s where product optimization comes in: a series of small, smart tweaks that stack up to massive impact.

Optimization isn’t just about boosting metrics (although, yes, you’ll do that too). It’s about building a product that’s more intuitive, valuable, and delightful for the people using it. When product managers (PMs) adopt an optimization mindset, everybody wins—especially your customers.

In this guide, we explore 3 ways great PMs optimize product performance—keeping their products sharp, their teams focused, and their users happy.

Product optimization is all about turning data into targeted improvements that boost your product’s performance, value, and impact. It’s not just about fixing what’s broken—it’s about constantly leveling up what’s already good. The best PMs stay curious, keep testing, and treat every user interaction as an opportunity to learn and improve.

Small, strategic changes to your product, features, or initiatives can lead to major wins, like

• Improving customer satisfaction, by meeting real user needs at the right moment, and increasing user engagement and loyalty

• Increasing conversions and revenue, by converting users into loyal customers and contributing to long-term business growth

• Enhancing performance, by resolving bugs, bottlenecks, and crashes to improve reliability and responsiveness

• Increasing competitiveness, by offering users better features, functionality, and overall value than your competitors

3 ways great product managers optimize product performance 

A great product optimization framework involves identifying areas for improvement, making changes, and continuously iterating for the best outcome. 

It begins with researching customer needs and preferences and analyzing data, continues with implementing CRO activities and creating prototypes, and ends with testing to see how they perform.

These are the 3 areas where you can make the most difference, improve what’s already working, and help your product perform even better:

1. Analyze user behavior and feedback to see what’s working and why

Product optimization isn’t about hunches and guesswork—it’s about using data to make incremental changes and maximize existing features. And to collect this data, you need a great tech stack.

Use these tools to make your product research process easier, faster, and full of actionable insights: 

Analytics tools to track user actions and preferences

Analytics tools give you a bird's-eye view of how users engage with your product—what drives results and what could still be improved.

With the right mix of user behavior and product insights tools, you unearth a rich stream of information you can use to understand your customers’ needs and frustrations. Here are our suggestions: 

• Google Analytics: the classic tool for analyzing web and app traffic so you can better understand how different user segments behave, flag conversion issues, and tailor content and products to increase engagement even more

• Mixpanel: dive into more granular data by tracking how customers use your product—from navigation to the most popular product features. This data informs product and feature development, optimizations, and iterations.

• Contentsquare: an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that provides quantitative data through tools like Acquisition Analysis, Dashboards, and Heatmaps, and more granular, qualitative information through tools such as Session Replay, Surveys, Interviews, and Journey Analysis. Product managers can use these insights to ensure they’re making the right decisions about what to optimize.

💡Pro tip: combine analytics tools for the perfect quantitative and qualitative data mix.

Contentsquare fills in the gaps left by tools like Mixpanel and Google Analytics to help you improve aspects of product manager optimizations, like ongoing product research and experimentation. For example:

• Connect what's happening in the user journey with why it happens by analyzing session replays and heatmaps filtered by events already set up in Google Analytics

• Ask users about their experience, needs, and frustrations by triggering a survey when they complete a key action and trigger a Mixpanel event in your product—so you can confidently move forward with improvements

• Enhance your Google Analytics quantitative data with the related session replays from Contentsquare to support your hypothesis for a product improvement opportunity

This helps product teams stay connected to the user experience and understand what needs to be optimized or fixed to better solve customer problems and increase product performance.

Heatmaps, journey analysis, and screen recordings to analyze user behavior and engagement

Nothing helps you understand how your customers use your product like seeing it with your own eyes. 

Analyzing heatmaps, screen recordings, and the customer journey helps you visualize how users interact with your product, showing you things like where they spend most of their time, and how they convert or drop off—so you can iterate, improve, and optimize brilliantly. This is where Contentsquare’s powerful experience analytics tools come in:

• Heatmaps: use Contentsquare Heatmaps to analyze aggregate user behavior on your website and see which elements users click and scroll through. This data about your product’s most popular and unpopular elements helps you determine which on-page elements to optimize to provide customers with the best possible experience. 

• Session Replay: leverage Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to get a play-by-play recording of how individual users interact with your features by analyzing mouse movements, scrolls, and navigation. Session Replay gives you insights through the customer’s eyes so you can optimize and iterate on your features based on a genuine understanding of the customer experience.

• Journey Analysis: use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis to visualize how users navigate through your site, from entry to exit, identifying common paths and drop-off points. By understanding these user flows, you can pinpoint areas where users may encounter friction and optimize the journey to enhance the user experience and drive conversions.

Capturing this user data helps you better address customer needs, making it easier to improve a feature that’s standing out, optimize your UX, and create a brilliant product for your users.

Choose the type of Contentsquare heatmap that best aligns with your optimization goal

How MyDeal used Contentsquare’s tools to optimize the user experience

Kelly Truong, Experience Design Lead at MyDeal, taps into Contentsquare’s powerful tools to transform the customer journey on both mobile and web.

By utilizing Heatmaps, Kelly identified areas of low interaction on the homepage. This insight led to the optimization of the homepage carousel, resulting in a 336% increase in revenue from this feature.

Additionally, Kelly's team used Session Replay to observe user behavior in real-time, uncovering friction points that were previously unnoticed. By addressing these issues, they improved the overall user experience and increased conversion rates by 2% on the payment page.

Contentsquare Heatmaps helped Kelly visualize the drop in carousel engagements—leading to optimizations

Surveys and interviews to gather direct feedback

Surveys and interviews give you first-hand, voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback to iterate and improve your product. Complement these insights with an always-on feedback button that users can click on if they want, to test effectiveness and hear directly from customers about what’s going well, how to replicate it, and where to optimize for even better performance. 

Contentsquare’s VoC tools help you do just that:

• Surveys: quickly and cost-effectively gather feedback from a large group to identify patterns and trends in user behavior. Contentsquare Surveys allows you to target specific user segments and personas. For example, you can choose to survey only users who convert, so you can find out what made them decide to start using your product.

• Interviews: gather insights on user attitudes, behavior, and nuanced feedback—but in a more intimate, one-on-one online setting. Contentsquare’s Interviews capability allows you to reach out to participants who accurately represent your target audience, and host, record, and transcribe your calls—so no detail is lost.

• Feedback widget: gather real-time feedback from users as they interact with your product and incorporate their insights into your optimization process, bridging the gap between user needs and product development.

Gathering this kind of qualitative data gives you a clearer picture of what needs to be addressed and how best to address it.

Contentsquare’s feedback widget lets you gather real-time insights to refine your user experience

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare's Slack integration to get a notification on Slack every time a user leaves feedback to stay on top of your product experience. You can then also tag your team, or discuss a quick fix with them in the platform.

Funnels to understand user flows and conversion journeys

Funnels are a critical tool in any product manager’s kit: they map your flow of product users to a set of specific steps that result in conversions or signups. Great PMs use funnel analysis to trace the user journey throughout their product and optimize it. Here’s how:

• Determine where high-quality visitors come from: when you understand how users who convert reach your product, you can focus more on those acquisition channels and increase the likelihood of conversions

• Find the high-traffic, high-exit pages where people are leaving: knowing where in the journey users drop off helps you focus your optimization efforts on the biggest opportunities

• Understand which strategies drive results: learn from your highest-converting flows and replicate your winning formula to increase conversion rates

Having the right tools to map out and analyze your funnels is crucial to getting the most out of them. Use them to gather the data you need to replicate your most fruitful flows and optimize your less successful ones, so you can improve conversions and drive real results.

• Mixpanel Funnels: dive deep into user behavior to measure product performance—learn which features are popular, who your power users are, and the behaviors tied to long-term retention. You can use Mixpanel Funnels to analyze common paths people take, then focus your time on optimizing the parts of your user experience that matter most.

• Contentsquare Funnel Analysis: combine funnel reports with additional analytics insights like replays, so you can identify actions and understand what drives them. Using Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis means that you can see screen recordings of users who dropped off the funnel with just one click, discover what’s causing the issue, and fix it, enabling you to send more traffic down your funnels to the pages that matter.

Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis in action

💡 Pro tip: pair Funnel Analysis with Form Analysis to zoom in on the why behind drop-offs. 

Funnel Analysis highlights where users exit, while Form Analysis uncovers what’s happening inside the form—like hesitation, errors, or abandoned fields—so you know exactly what to fix to drive completions.

An example of a Form Analysis report

How Buzz Bingo uses Contentsquare to continuously improve UX

Jazmin Hill, Product Manager at Buzz Bingo, uses Contentsquare’s suite of tools to optimize the user experience and improve site performance with each iteration.

For example, when Jazmin noticed drop-offs during the registration process, she used Form Analysis to identify which form fields were causing friction. By simplifying the process, the team was able to reduce abandonment rates, significantly improving their conversion rates.

To further refine the user experience, Jazmin's team also uses Session Replay to observe user interactions with new features. This provides real-time insights into pain points, allowing the team to address issues quickly. Additionally, they use Heatmaps to see how users engage with key areas of the site. These insights led to design changes that increased user engagement and improved overall satisfaction, with a measurable increase in conversions.

Product manager optimizations in action: Buzz Bingo uses Contentsquare’s Form Analysis to visualize tap reoccurrence

2. Identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement to fine-tune product performance

In the quest for product optimization, your users are your best resource. Authentic customer insights and opinions are critical to understanding which features to prioritize and the changes you need to introduce to optimize your product. Next, you need to set clear, attainable goals for your optimization efforts. 

Define pain points and areas of friction

• Dive into the data sources above to identify pain points, bottlenecks, and frustration—anything impeding user interaction, productivity, or satisfaction. See where users are getting stuck or dropping off and find opportunities to optimize their journey. 

Use some of Contentsquare’s Experience Monitoring tools to understand what’s frustrating your users:

• Speed Analysis: a slow site kills conversions. This tool helps you spot where slow loading times are hurting the journey—like large images or third-party scripts delaying page load. Use it to see which pages are pushing users to bounce and prioritize fixes that get them moving again.

• Error Analysis: rage clicks are your users crying out for help. Use Error Analysis to see where they’re running into issues—like failed form submissions, 404s, or JavaScript bugs—so you can identify what’s broken, understand the impact, and fix it before it costs you more drop-offs.

Create a clear optimization roadmap

Use the data you collected in the previous step to create a product optimization roadmap and break it down into product stories. List these out and develop a prioritization framework to set your focus and develop a backlog to maximize time, energy, and resources.

Establishing a roadmap boosts continuous discovery—gathering information about your customers to validate and refine your product ideas. This is essential when it comes to building a product and optimizing features that delight customers.

Finally, transform your top priorities into SMART objectives by adding time constraints and success metrics. For example, if you’ve discovered that onboarding is a common complaint, you could set the objective “to improve onboarding rates by 50% over the next 6 months.”

3. Address performance issues and optimize UX to supercharge product effectiveness

Once you have a strong sense of user problems, you can start thinking about solutions. 

Your customer-centric CRO efforts so far—like conducting surveys and analyzing session recordings—have given you priceless user insights. Part of your job as a product manager involves transforming these insights into activities that improve and enhance the user experience. 

UX optimization and CRO share a focus on making your product accessible, engaging, and easy to use. They ensure every task on your product is easy to perform and each step in the conversion process flows logically. 

Overall, investing in the user experience helps you create a more valuable product that solves problems for your users so they can reach their goals more effectively. In turn, this translates to increased conversions and revenue.

Iterative development and testing

As you go through your optimization roadmap, make small, incremental changes to your UX and test to see if they work. The goal is to establish a process with near-constant experimentation, where you try changes one at a time, quickly deploying them to a subset of the users and measuring the results.  

Test your iterations in whatever way makes the most sense. If you’re working on an improvement to a web page, for example, you might want to A/B test it against your current page. If you’re creating a new product or feature, consider doing usability testing with a set of potential customers. 

Create regular touchpoints in the design and delivery process to check in with users and stakeholders and validate each iteration as you go for agile product management.

The key to this iterative process is trial and error: your team works to refine and improve your product based on feedback or new information, and the product gets better over time as a result of these changes.

💡 Pro tip: complement your experiments with digital experience insights from Contentsquare.

When running tests, you’ll want to know what UX updates to make, and how each one performs, based on all the user feedback you collect.

A/B tests can reveal what users like or dislike about your product. But they lack context—the answer to why users prefer one variation over another. Digital experience insights help you confidently fill in the gaps for a comprehensive understanding of user behavior.

Contentsquare integrations make it easy to act on that feedback and create more engaging experiences. Conduct effortless A/B testing with Optimizely or Omniconvert, then filter your session replays and user feedback by experiment to understand how users interacted with different versions of your product and what you can do to optimize their experience.

Spot something interesting? With our Slack integration, send specific session replays to your team members—and start an early conversation about your findings.

Monitoring and evaluating the impact of each iteration

No optimization plan is complete without determining how you’ll track progress and results. As a PM, you need to keep an eye on key metrics and report on their evolution.

The product metrics and KPIs you define in your product roadmap help you see an even broader picture and measure your progress. As you select which conversion rate optimization metrics to track, ask yourself:

• What does success look like in 3 months, 6 months, and one year? For example, you could aim to increase your customer retention rate by 25% in 6 months, and increase revenue by 10% in a year. 

• How and when will your team review the product optimization roadmap and assess the progress made? For example, your team could meet monthly to track progress on KPIs, and biannually to evaluate the roadmap’s performance—including whether it needs revising.

💡 Pro tip: understand the why behind your product metrics with Contentsquare. 

Set up dedicated Contentsquare dashboards for each of your areas of interest. For instance, when you release a new feature, you can track its adoption, watch related session recordings, and analyze important metrics like bounce rate and average session duration—all from one centralized location. Filters let you get very granular and segment the data based on what you need.

But you can also have dashboards to monitor the performance of your homepage or your onboarding flow. 

View important user metrics on the Contentsquare Dashboard and figure out the why behind the numbers

Next steps to product optimization

As a product manager, you have the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to your business and your users. Optimizing your product is one of your most important contributions—but it's not easy to get right.

There’s no substitute for listening to your customers and caring deeply about their experience. Stellar product managers don’t stop at analyzing user behavior—they dig to unearth users' underlying needs, and use tools like Contentsquare for data-driven decision-making and improvements. 

Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, the best PMs leverage user insights to refine successful products through continuous, incremental changes. Ultimately, their product manager optimizations are what make a difference between good products and amazing ones.

FAQs about product optimization