Here’s a dirty little secret: Product Analytics is useless.

It’s strange, right? After all, we’re a Product Analytics company. We literally built a tool that delivers product analytics in a new way. 

Recently, though, we’ve been looking at the analytics landscape and making some realizations. Primary among these is despite the transformative power analytics has on product development—analytics are like a superpower for product—most of the time analytics ends up doing far less for its users than it could.

Why is this? In our experience, product analytics is useless because of a simple mistake companies (and people) tend to make, over and over. (It also happens to be a mistake promoted by marketing departments everywhere.) It’s this:

THE TOOL IS NOT THE ACTION