Products I Can’t Live Without #1: Fullstory

Over the past few years, I’ve written many blog posts mentioning the tools and products I use to be a more effective Product Manager and Product leader.

I’ve written about the Toolkit of the Modern Product Manager, I’ve shared 41 Ways to Get Feedback on Your Idea or Product, and I’ve even helped you try to determine whether to Build or Buy solutions to the problems you and your business face.

But what I haven’t done yet is an in-depth breakdown of a specific product I can’t live without.

Welcome to a (short) series of posts on Products I Can’t Live Without.

The bar is very high for products in this series. The products I’m featuring aren’t only indispensable; they’re so valuable that I’d be a significantly less effective Product Manager without them. I would be very very disappointed (and very angry) if they did not exist.

At least this angry…

Products I Can’t Live Without #1: Fullstory

Fullstory was founded in 2012, which in startup years, means it’s veritably middle-aged. Although the way they’ve pitched their business has changed over the years, they currently describe their value proposition as:

Solve problems, find answers, and fine-tune your customer experience with FullStory’s easy-to-use digital intelligence platform.

Let’s go back to 2012 when Fullstory was founded. At the time (and for several years after), I worked for Vistaprint Digital. I managed several products for Vistaprint over those next few years, including a Social Media Management product, an iOS app, and a Website Builder.

I had analytics, boy did I have analytics. Thanks to Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and querying our database directly, I could get counts + trends of pretty much any action anyone took from the time they loaded our external website to the time they published their website to the time they upgraded to our paid version.

But, something was missing. I couldn’t understand HOW users were using our product. Where were they struggling in the user experience, where were they clicking where they shouldn’t be, what was missing from our feature set?

Pre-Fullstory, I solved this problem through customer interviews (either in person or over Google Hangouts). I still highly recommend these interviews (I still do them today) as the high-touch approach yields feedback that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

But the challenge was scale. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for that many interviews!

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying this post, I know you will enjoy the great content at The Modern Product Manager.

If you prefer books, I think you’d also enjoy Disrupting Yourself (How to Succeed in the New Economy) or Building Digital Products (Handbook for Product Managers).

How Fullstory Makes a Huge Difference

As I reflected on all of the different ways I use and have used Fullstory, I realized that there are several different functional purposes that the product serves for me.

1. Qualitative Observation at Scale

Don’t you wish you could look over the proverbial “shoulder” of your users and observe how they use your product?

Fullstory allows you to go beyond 1’s and 0’s for feature usage and dive into how they used that feature. Did they figure it out quickly or did they mouse over many different areas before diving in?

2. FAST Bug Diagnosis

At all of my companies, Fullstory has been an essential component of my bug diagnosis toolkit. Immediately upon receiving a bug report from a user, I watch their Fullstory session to see the exact steps they went through leading up to that issue.

Fullstory also captures console and network errors, alerting you when they spike above pre-determined thresholds. Find potential issues before your customers do.

3. Build Empathy With Team

While empathy is best built through direct exposure to customers, hearing the words they use to articulate their problems and the ways they use your product to solve their problems, Fullstory is an amazing additional way to build customer empathy.

Did you launch a new feature or ship a big bug? Fullstory lets you quickly filter to view the subset of users that tried that feature or hit that devastating bug and share that view with the team. It only takes watching 3–5 of these sessions to start seeing patterns and to start building empathy.

4. See Patterns Incredibly Quickly

It takes surprisingly few user sessions to see and understand patterns of usage for any feature or product, regardless of complexity. With only 5–10 users, you can see what’s easy, what’s hard, where users spend their time, and hypothesize how to improve your product.

In under 30 minutes with Fullstory, you can watch enough sessions and adjust your priorities incredibly quickly based on the patterns you see.

Examples When Fullstory Saved The Day

To drive home just how much I love Fullstory and how much of an impact it has made, I wanted to share an example from each of my past 4 companies.

Vistaprint Digital

As Product Manager of the Websites product at Vistaprint, it was essential to understand the ways people built their websites. How did the behaviors of users who started with pre-built templates vary from those who started from scratch? What was the right balance of forcing formatting vs. allowing customization?

With Fullstory, we were able to gather incredibly valuable insights on these questions and many, many more, helping us increase our publish rate and our retention rates.

Upside Travel

At Upside Travel, we had a problem. We were only making incremental progress on the conversion rate of our purchase funnel and that progress was far too slow.

Enter Morpheus, a completely new booking funnel with that introduced selective bundling and Uber rides as a third travel option (in addition to Air + Hotel).

We built Morpheus on an incredibly fast timeline with the tightest feedback loop I’ve ever experienced. Two times a day, we watched the latest Fullstory sessions of users often trying features we had shipped just hours earlier. Fullstory was incredibly valuable in seeing what worked, what didn’t, and reacting nimbly to build the best possible user experience.

ICX Media

At ICX Media, we provide large Media + Entertainment clients with deep, data-driven Audience and Content insights to help them maximize revenue and reach new populations of viewers.

When working with these big companies, the stakes for stability are high. For that reason, when a bug is identified either internally or externally, we need to fix it and fix it FAST.

Fullstory helps keep the time from bug discovery to bug resolution as short as possible by providing instant reproduction steps and visuals that make our engineer’s job significantly easier in determining what went wrong.

Bullseye

At Bullseye, the team is focused on helping make the college application process easier and significantly less stressful. But, what the team found was nothing causes stress and rage clicks like a complex and non-standard onboarding flow.

Through watching hundreds of user sessions on Fullstory, Bullseye was able to fix these issues, resulting in significantly increased onboarding conversion rate. They managed to do this while also collecting additional valuable information on both students and parents to help serve both better.

What’s a Product You Can’t Live Without as a PM?

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter at @amitch5903!

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Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I earn a commission if you click them and purchase a product.