Name the moments that signal value in your product.
“What should my product analyst actually measure to know a customer is getting value?”
Interviews you about your product, names the events that mean real value, tiers each by reliability, and rolls them into a short capability list your analyst can score.
What this skill does
Turns "what should we actually measure?" into a taxonomy your team can trust. It interviews you about your product, names the events that signal real value (not vanity clicks), tiers each one by how reliably it means what you think it means, and rolls the whole set into a short list of capabilities an analyst can score. The output is the source of truth every downstream product read runs on, so two people asking "how are they using us?" get the same answer.
Inputs
- Works today with: a plain description of your product, its core actions, and the outcomes a healthy customer reaches. Paste it and go.
- More powerful connected to a product-analytics tool: it reads your live event stream, so it names real events instead of ones you hope exist, and flags the ones that barely fire.
- Sharper with a data warehouse: it checks event volume and reliability across the whole base before it trusts an event.
- Sharper with your onboarding or activation docs: it maps the taxonomy to the journey you already designed.
How it works
- 1Name the value moments
Start from the outcome, not the feature. Ask what a customer has to do repeatedly for the product to be working for them. Those repeated, outcome-linked actions are your candidate value moments. A click is not a value moment. A completed core action that ties to why they bought is.
- 2Tier every event by reliability
Every candidate event gets a tier: TIER 1 (fires cleanly, means exactly one thing, high volume), TIER 2 (useful but noisy or lower volume, use with care), TIER 3 (a trap, looks like value but is not, or double-counts a Tier 1). Name the traps out loud so no one builds a read on them later.
- 3Roll events into capabilities
Group the trusted events into a short list of capabilities, the features that actually signal value. Each capability maps to its raw events explicitly, so an analyst can score adoption per capability instead of drowning in event names.
- 4Set the adoption rubric
Define what POWER, ESTABLISHED, EMERGING, DORMANT, UNTOUCHED, and NEVER-ADOPTED mean for each capability, in your product's real numbers. This is the rubric every product read reuses, so adoption means the same thing every time.
- 5Flag the anti-signals
Call out the events that inflate a picture: logins, page views, passive opens, anything that rises when nothing of value happened. A baseline "any activity" signal is fine as a floor, never as proof of value.
Output format
EVENT TAXONOMY · [your product] · built [date]
Capability Raw events (trusted) Tier
Core action action_completed 1
Automation rule_created, rule_ran 1
Templates template_used 2 (noisy: counts drafts)
AI assist ai_compose_accepted 1
Integrations integration_connected 2 (low volume)
TRAPS (do not build reads on these):
- session_start looks active, means nothing about value
- page_view inflates any "usage" number
Adoption rubric (Core action):
Power >= 5 completions/week · Established 1-4 · Emerging <1 ·
Dormant used then stopped 14d+ · Untouched never fired
Next: instrument ai_compose_accepted server-side; it is Tier 1 logic
but currently client-only, so ~15% of fires are lost.
Tips
- Every trusted event has a named tier and a one-line reason. No untiered events in the taxonomy.
- Traps are named explicitly, not quietly dropped.
- Each capability lists the exact raw events it rolls up, never a vague label.
- The adoption rubric is in your product's real numbers, not borrowed defaults.
- No event is trusted on volume it does not have. A rare event is Tier 2 or 3, never Tier 1.
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