How great product managers create powerful reports to drive action and growth

Do your product reports leave stakeholders lost at sea with too many metrics to make sense of? Or do they chart a clear course by weaving user and product data into a captivating narrative? If you want to create reports that achieve the latter, you're in the right place.

This guide shows you how to take your product reports from good to great by turning data into meaningful insights. You’ll discover how to connect the dots between raw numbers and real user stories, helping you craft reports that drive action and inspire your team.

We also dive into how to report on product performance like a pro and share 3 product report examples to get you started.

How to report on product performance like a pro in 5 steps

Carefully crafted product reports help you prioritize initiatives with ease, win buy-in, and propel your team forward. With clear data insights and compelling narratives, these reports not only align your team around common goals but also provide a solid foundation for decision-making, ensuring everyone is on the same page as you drive your product toward success.

Here’s how to make waves as a product manager reporting on product performance:

1. Determine your data types and sources

Product managers keep a close eye on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and report on their evolution. These metrics should align with your product vision and product strategy—what your product will become when it ‘grows up’ and what steps you need to take now to get closer to that goal.

For better product performance reporting, classify your most crucial metrics into 2 buckets: leading indicators and lagging indicators.

After setting targets against your goals, track your progress using product analytics tools. For example, you might measure website traffic with Google Analytics (GA) and study trends in Mixpanel. Then, there’s Contentsquare (that’s us 👋), which gives you traffic data, trends, and qualitative user behavior insights all in one place.

Did you know? Contentsquare’s all-in-one platform does it all, but we also have easy-to-use integrations with Google Analytics and Mixpanel should you need to reference GA and Mixpanel reports.

🛠️ Add Contentsquare to your reporting kit

Contentsquare’s full suite of digital experience insights solutions helps PMs produce impactful product reports. Our capabilities—like Session Replay, Heatmaps, Interviews, and Surveys, to name a few—work together to weave a powerful narrative that inspires your team and engages your bosses.

Keep your eyes peeled for hot tips on maximizing Contentsquare’s tools and features throughout this article. 👀

2. Create dedicated dashboards for several areas of interest

PMs need a place to monitor all the metrics we’ve just mentioned. Enter dashboards. As your team’s command center, a dashboard offers a real-time, visual overview of key metrics and KPIs.

With an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare, it’s even possible to set up multiple dashboards for different areas of interest:

• Create a dedicated dashboard to track the adoption of a newly released feature

• Maintain other dashboards to swiftly and frequently monitor performance, e.g. that of your homepage or onboarding flow

Here’s another reason to play around with dashboards: they‘re dynamic and interactive, allowing you to drill down into specific data points and dive into the real user behavior behind the metrics in a single click.

An example of a dedicated Contentsquare dashboard for key performance metrics

✅ Make deep dives a habit

Say you just launched an AI personal trainer feature on your fitness app. You want a well-rounded picture of its initial adoption, so you look at the number of daily active users and average session lengths, which continue to climb. 

But then, you notice a spike in rage clicks—rapid, frustration-induced clicks or taps. You click through to watch recordings (or replays) of sessions where these rage clicks occurred.

Instantly, you discover users skipping yoga poses and advanced HIIT routines because of confusing instructions. You bring it up with the product marketing team to discuss rewriting the unclear cues, and turn to Contentsquare’s AI-powered Surveys tool to craft the right questions and send a pain point survey to users for deeper insights. 

Then sit back and let our built-in AI turn that feedback into a ready-to-go report—saving you hours and getting you straight to the good stuff.

Contentsquare’s AI-powered Surveys tool generates questions based on your survey goal

3. Find the smallest data segment possible

Product managers use segmentation to divide and organize data based on key criteria. Segmentation lets you get super-granular and view the data according to your needs. Easily search for the information that matters to your team for faster decision-making and better troubleshooting. 

For instance, when sorting through your session replays or journeys in Contentsquare, leverage its filters and segmentation features to create and find the smallest segment of your data. This helps you fight overwhelm—that feeling of not knowing where to start—which can happen if you’re faced with many session replays. 

To see fewer, hyper-relevant replays or journeys, filter by

• Segments

• User actions

• Session attributes, e.g. geography, device, Contentsquare user ID

• Technology

• Goals

• A/B test

• Integrations

You can also apply filters to segment and analyze data from Contentsquare capabilities like Heatmaps, Surveys, Error Analysis, User, and Page Comparator, adding depth to your data analytics reports.

Use filters to narrow down your data

4. Weave quantitative and qualitative data into a compelling narrative

PMs tap into numeric and visual data for various purposes. They monitor overall product health and success, understand the user experience (UX), spot problems and opportunities, and track product development progress.

But there’s a snag: merely showing statistics and charts can lead to a piecemeal grasp of product issues. This approach can also cause data fatigue, which prevents teams from knowing which tasks to prioritize. Plus, the numbers may not be enough to convince higher-ups, which could lead to less budget and support.

Fortunately, you can sprinkle storytelling into your product reports to improve your chances of success. Blending website performance metrics with UX insights enables you to craft clear and compelling reports for your target audience. This way, you don't just cite the data; you also explain why it matters.

Here’s an example:

Map out the user journey using Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis and Journeys tools, highlighting the paths users take through a product and where they drop off. Then, use Heatmaps to understand where users click, move, scroll, and rage-click, offering a visual story about user engagement and behavior within the product’s interface.

See user behavior from every angle with Contentsquare’s full suite of heatmaps

This paints the full picture of user behavior, allowing your team to identify and address key issues while enabling your executives to develop more effective strategies and decisions.

5. Generate product reports based on specific goals and target stakeholders

Product managers use reports to keep the most relevant information visible to the right viewers. This way, it’s easier to align the team with product goals, motivate individual members to take ownership, and communicate a product’s impact to execs.

To maximize value, you can create tailored reports for different groups: product teams, sales and marketing, and the executives. Here are 3 types of reports for specific audiences:

• Customer reports for customer-facing teams

• Performance reports for individuals and teams

• Periodic reports for executives

Check out our mini-guide on how to craft these reports below. 👇

3 product reporting examples and their audiences

1. Share customer reports with customer-facing teams

In a cross-functional team, where different departments come together to achieve product goals, PMs are responsible for keeping everyone on the same page. Part of their job is to build customer reports for customer-facing teams, such as sales, marketing, and customer success.

🔥 Contentsquare in action

Design a survey that asks open-ended questions and launch it on your website to reveal your users’ hidden needs and potential feature requests. Once you nail the most urgent request, share the information with marketing so they can start a campaign for the upcoming launch, or sales so they can create a new pipeline.

Contentsquare’s Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey template lets you add open-ended follow-up questions so you can understand the reasons behind users' ratings

2. Show performance results to your team

Highlight your team’s performance in your project status report. Here, you can compare actual progress against milestones, budgets, and timelines. This allows you to celebrate wins while making room to discuss upcoming tasks and activities.

🔥 Contentsquare in action

You don’t need to do all the talking in meetings. Instead, use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to take snapshots of real users successfully adopting a new feature. Share them with your team to spark conversations and uncover fresh insights. Watch how people naturally interact with your product—the pages they visit, the elements they engage with, and the moments that turn curiosity into love.

The beauty of Session Replay is that it also shows you the opposite of a good user experience: what people go through before they bounce. Use the insights to identify and address any cause of user frustration.

Make a comment on or take a snapshot of a particularly insightful moment in the Session Replay tool to share with your team 

3. Provide high-level insights for executives

Deliver concise, direct updates to executives on the status of various product developments. Craft an executive summary that outlines each project, the teams involved, and their launch timelines.

🔥 Contentsquare in action

Use visual data like replays and heatmaps to show how users interact with your product, including the parts that delight, frustrate, or drive them away altogether. Feedback responses from surveys also capture direct user sentiments about new features or updates. 

Take it a step further by conducting user interviews through Contentsquare’s Interviews tool. These interviews offer in-depth, qualitative data. When you include excerpts or key findings from these interviews in your report, you provide compelling, firsthand evidence of user experiences and needs.

Survey your own users or find the right people from a pool of over 200,000 testers with Contentsquare’s Interviews tool

Chart your course to success with clear and impactful product reports  

Grow stronger with each captivating product report. Use Contentsquare to uncover the valuable insights hidden in your data. Transform these insights into strategies that boost user satisfaction and drive product success.

Are you ready to raise the anchor and set sail? With your reports as your guide and Contentsquare lighting the way, you have everything you need to drive your team to inspired action and fantastic results.

FAQs about product reporting