Hotjar Team

The new year is well underway. And by this time, many people’s New Year’s resolutions are well out of mind. 

But we don’t want that to happen to you. So we put together a list of 10 New Year’s resolutions web-olutions to help you stay tuned into the goals you’ve set for yourself, and the goals you may have forgotten to put on your list. 

Prioritizing product roadmaps, building trust with your team, and overcoming the biggest and baddest product obstacles. This, plus plenty more. 

So grab your notebook and let’s make sure this year counts.

Why do you work where you do? What made you want to work there? And now that you’re there, why do you decide to stay?

We sat down with Kristina Maleeva, our Sales team Lead for the Americas, to find out why Hotjar is where she calls home. We learned a lot about what makes Hotjar’s Sales culture unique, some company perks that you don’t hear every day, and an approach to remote work that actually works.

How much time do you spend a week in recurring meetings? How many of those are actually useful to you? If you’re like most product teams, I’m sure you’ve got your remote rituals pretty much nailed by now. Right? Sure.

At Hotjar, we’ve been doing this fully remote work thing since 2014. Yes, way before the pandemic hit. And to be honest, we still haven’t nailed it. But we have learned some things along the way that have helped.

Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team. 

As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.

Being a product manager can feel like being on safari. You’ve planned the route you want to take and you have your backpack full of tools ready—but changing environments and unpredictable creatures can derail your plans at any moment.

One of our values is that we challenge ourselves to grow. By hosting external speakers and sharing their ideas, we’re hoping to inspire you, our Hotjar community, to grow too. 

Hotjar was always going to be a remote company, long before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2014, when Hotjar began, our three founders all lived in Malta, yet they didn’t know how long they’d be there and where life would take them next.

So, they set out to create a remote company, and what better way to practice than by working from different corners of the island? It could’ve been easy to have a Meetup and work alongside each other, but David, Marc, and Jonathan started as they meant to go on.

Now, a few years and over 100 employees later, and in the spirit of one of our values—build trust with transparency—we’re ready to share some tips with the world. We asked Hotjarians about their experiences of working remotely and we’ve summarized them below.

A record number of people are leaving their jobs. It’s a phenomenon being called ‘The Great Resignation’, where more workers are planning to leave their jobs than ever before.

Some are pointing to the slow move to flexible or remote working as the main culprit. While on the other hand, some businesses have ignored this entirely and adopted the tactic of moving everyone right back into the office and returning to business as usual. (As a remote business, we don’t comply with this!)

Nevertheless, businesses are currently experiencing an exodus of talent. And on top of that, they’re having just as much trouble filling those empty seats.

A few weeks ago, we put Megan Murphy, the VP of Product at Hotjar, on the spot to answer our users’ burning questions.

In these two videos, Megan covers everything from how to get strategy buy-in to handling loud voices in meetings to whether she’d abandon everything to open a bar on the beach.

So, despite it not being in our usual format for our Building in Public video series, whether you’re an experienced Product Manager or looking to start your product career, there’s something in here for you.

The work of a product team never ends. There's no 'completion date' for growing revenue, reducing churn, increasing product usage, improving task completion, lowering the number of support tickets; and the list goes on.

But at the core of it lies the ultimate goal: to improve the user experience and create customer delight.

Would you believe that we managed to get every discipline equally excited about a single OKR? One that encouraged paying down some expensive tech debt, brought in some much-needed delight to a rather dull area of our product experience, and drove impressive business metrics—all at the same time?

Product feedback is one of a product management team’s most effective tools, but only when that feedback comes with the proper context.

Let’s take three product teams:

Team A ignores conversion metrics and focuses only on KPIs related to active users (MAU and DAU), retention (CRR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Team B is fixated on product conversion rates, using the numbers as a North Star for understanding features or pages that trigger or block user actions.

Team C pays close attention to conversion rates, but as a springboard for diving deeper, getting inside users’ heads, and understanding why they do or don’t take actions that lead to conversions.

There’s a clear winner here.

How do you measure a product manager’s performance? And how do you make sure the criteria you’re using is setting them up for a successful and rewarding career?

At Hotjar, we believe competency frameworks should be empowering. They should help others give feedback, provide transparent guidance about the expectations of a PM's role, and clearly signpost how they can reach the next step in their career.

Which one should you choose?

Imagine you’re running a brick-and-mortar store. From your perch at the counter, you can see and fix any issues the customers have as they move around the shop: if they have trouble navigating the aisles, you can make adjustments and help out; when they come up to the counter, you can strike up a conversation and learn who they are and what they’re looking for.

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: it’s not an either/or (and why you should use both).

Hotjar vs Lucky Orange: which one should you choose?

Hotjar vs Mouseflow: which one should your team choose?

If you’re in a product team (or just have a product-related hobby), we’ve got some exciting news for you. We’ve just launched the first episode of a new video series called Building in Public, where we share the secrets of how we build Hotjar—as we build Hotjar.

Watch the first episode—all about Hotjar’s product principles—right here:

You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.

But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?

You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?

Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how: 

At Hotjar, we believe that success shouldn’t be measured in profits alone, but rather in the contributions to all stakeholders; our team, customers, end-users, partners, the community, and the planet.

Which is why in 2017—on the Spanish coast at one of our bi-annual meetups—we announced that Hotjar would begin pledging 1% of our revenue to ‘giving back’. We didn’t have a solid plan on how we’d give, but we knew we wanted to do it in a meaningful way.

Continuously optimizing your website is critical to sustaining long-term growth. In the battle for visitors and conversions, one of your most valuable weapons is your ability to always iterate new and better versions of your website as user expectations (and the competitive landscape) evolve.

How well do you understand your prospects and customers? Do you know who they are, what keeps them awake at night, and what brought them to your business in search of a solution?

As part of Hotjar's month-long celebration activities this Pride Month, we held an LGBTQIA+ panel for the team—exploring how to show up for and represent LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace.

As a product manager, your job is to deliver a product your users love.

It seems simple when put that way, doesn’t it?

If you’re part of a remote or distributed team, you may have noticed the productivity boosts you gain by working asynchronously. But moving your business forward has to happen while your team stays firmly focused and aligned on what matters most: your customers.

Traditional metrics like customer retention rate (CRR) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are good to know, but they don't tell you the whole story of customer churn. To really make a difference in your retention rate, you need to know why customers stop using your product—and how you can get them to stick with it.

Despite all the time you’ve spent perfecting your conversion funnel, visitors still aren’t converting. You’ve invested in your site's design and navigation, you've increased your marketing efforts, and you’re following all the 'best practices' for conversion optimization.

But if you don't understand how real customers shop online, you're missing an opportunity to optimize your ecommerce conversion funnel to reflect each visitor's unique customer journey.

If you’re hoping to see a stand-off with Hotjar versus Crazy Egg, we must ask that you stand down right now. The Crazy Egg team has done a great job creating a product that businesses use for heatmaps, user session recordings, and A/B testing.

Have you ever wondered what your users think of your website? Sure you have. But have you let your users inform (even dictate) your design process? If you're like a lot of website owners in the world, your answer might be: maybe.

Developing a product without user feedback is like having a relationship without conversation. (Not great.)

And while there are plenty of ways to learn about your users—like watching session recordings, A/B testing, and even scouring forums where they spend their time—online surveys are one of the best ways to get direct user feedback.

You spent months planning your online event, and now that it’s over, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast! After hosting an event, there’s one more thing you absolutely must do: send post-event surveys to your attendees.

Conferences are great. You get to meet people, learn stuff, not be at work for the day. Joyful.

But let’s be honest: most conferences you go to end up with the two best talks scheduled to clash, then three hours of killing time until the next good one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick and choose which talks happen, and when?

Building a SaaS product, app, or site?

If you’re a Product Creator in any capacity, the way you build your product will dictate the level of success you'll achieve. Like me, you’ve seen products and apps come and go. Some disappear as quickly as they arrive, and some (like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, et al) have achieved incredible success.

But, why is it that people get hooked on some products while others don't even make a ripple in the pond?

When you get on a website and read a wall of customer testimonials that gush with nothing but praise, it’s not surprising if your first reactions are skepticism or suspicion.

At Hotjar, we use Hotjar in everything we do.

Whether it’s building, writing, scaling, designing, or hiring - Hotjar helps us make Hotjar better. We’re firm believers of practicing what we preach (and we 100% believe in our product) so using Hotjar to grow Hotjar is a must for our team.

In June 2016 the Hotjar team flew in from all over the world to spend a week together on the gorgeous island of Malta (click here in case you’re wondering where it is).

Ask 10 marketers about marketing funnels and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Why is that? A marketing funnel isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy; your marketing funnel is uniquely tailored to how your buyer buys.

When you think about website conversions, you might think about percentages and averages that measure metrics and data points—like orders completed, subscription upgrades, and click-through rates.

But what do those metrics and data points actually tell you about your customers—the people you want to serve; the people you want to captivate, engage, and persuade?

If you want your visitors to keep returning to your website—to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and ultimately grow revenue—you need to understand what’s happening when they reach your site.

If you don’t understand your customers, it’s almost impossible to improve your product or service for them.

Online surveys make it easier than ever to get to know your users, but even a short, simple survey can leave you with a headache-inducing amount of user data to sort through.

So how do you make sense of it all?

Most startup founders dream of creating a single successful company.

David Cancel has done it 5 times.

His latest company, Drift, has already raised $107 million in funding and acquired over 70,000 active users in just 4 years.

So how did he do it?

The key has been a customer-driven methodology that David stumbled upon almost by accident at one of his previous companies.

Building a killer app is not a simple feat and requires relentless focus on what’s important not only for driving business but making our users happy. Our focus is on what will help them achieve their goals and eradicate pain points - their success is ours. With a limited number of resources at hand, how do we build a product that keeps our users happy without getting carried away with projects and features that add very little value?

Making the right choice when deciding what to work on next is crucial. A bad decision now could have a huge impact on how quickly you are able to scale or pivot later on. At Hotjar we ask ourselves three simple questions when deciding what we want to focus on:

Sticking an opt-in gate in front of your content and counting how many people go through it has become the go-to solution to measure lead generation and marketing success. But is inundating people with pop-ups that promise mind-blowing content in exchange for their email address really the best way to go about building your brand/business?

From micro-conversions (like add-to-cart) to macro-conversions (like hitting that 'confirm purchase' button), conversions are forever being tracked and optimized on every level, and low conversion rates are a common struggle (and, sometimes, a mystery).

This article will put an end to the struggle, and help you get the answers you need.

When Hotjar was initially built the founders knew they wanted the company to grow and flourish in a remote environment. Rather than be held back, they wanted to allow the flexibility to find the best people in the world while also providing the opportunity for Hotjar employees to live wherever they wanted, spend time with their families and friends at their leisure, and control their own working schedules. This belief system quickly grew into what we all call 'The Hotjar Way' internally. We have been able to grow, manage, and maintain an awesome culture across the world. So we wanted to share with you how we did it!

Ah, the user interview. Without a doubt one of the most valuable exercises you can run for understanding users better. But how can you, the interviewer, make sure you get the insights you need (and end up with a happy interviewee)? The first stage is understanding what this is—and what it isn’t.

Want to win over more customers? Make it easier for them to trust you.

A positive user experience helps you build and maintain a positive customer relationship—and product teams can help create a positive user experience that leads to sales, inspires repeat purchases, and encourages customers to recommend your brand to others.

If you’re a business selling online, it’s important to create a website experience your users will love. A poor user experience or frustrating customer journey can negatively affect your site’s conversion rate, and ultimately your revenue.

If you’ve come here to learn more about Google Analytics heat maps, we have both good and bad news for you.

The bad news: Google stopped supporting its heatmap add-on in 2017, and recent reviews confirm that it doesn’t work anymore for a lot of users.

The good news: there's another way for you to get a free heatmap using Hotjar, and we guarantee it will work.

27 example questions to ask your users to discover ways to improve your product.

+70 different survey questions you can use to learn more about your prospects and customers.

Find hundreds of users for research with this survey template.

Find the Goldilocks price for your product or service—not too much, yet not too little.

Here are 28 questions we love asking customers.

Discover the pain points that cause users to leave your product/service with this four question survey.

10 questions to ask visitors on your site to spot issues, discover opportunities and prioritize your work.

Determine how long it takes your customers to get an issue resolved with this time to resolution (TTR) survey template.

Five popular questions to ask your customers before you launch your product.

Learn why customers are leaving to increase retention.

Collecting, analyzing, and measuring your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Understanding your customers is vital. But developing an accurate picture of your customers doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort.

Truly understand your target audience with this demographics survey template.

Gather actionable employee feedback at scale.

20+ questions to ask in user testing—and when to ask them

Gather feedback on your product. Learn how to improve and what users really think.

Gather feedback before you launch your product with this survey for beta users.

Does your copy and messaging resonate? Find ways to improve your content with this survey.

Building a brand new product? Discover more about your target users with this survey.

Are you making the most of your pricing plan? Find out what buyers think with this survey.

Capture feedback before a visitor leaves and learn why they exit your site.

Learn where your audience first heard about your brand.

Learn why users stopped using your product.

Collect insights to determine your product-market fit.

Discover if your customers are satisfied with your product or service.

Continuous delivery and discovery help product teams learn more effectively and provide value to customers. 

But some teams have been hesitant to adopt these techniques because they aren’t sure how to properly balance delivery and discovery.

Let’s take a look at continuous delivery and continuous discovery: where they came from, how they’re different, and how an effective product team can strike the right balance to deliver customers the right product, in the right way, at the right time.

The average product team spends a huge amount of time juggling loads of different tasks, pressures, and demands. 

On an average day, urgent user requests and stakeholder asks pour in, meetings line up, the product backlog expands, and product team members find their best-laid plans changed or delayed.

Sound familiar? 

These pressures are intrinsic to product work, but if you let them grow, they’ll destroy your focus, strategy, and delivery. 

Luckily, they can be managed.

Great product teams bring together a variety of backgrounds, points of view, skills, and personalities, which is essential to building a successful team—but it can also lead to tension and conflict. 

However, with the right mindset and a thoughtful approach, conflict can inspire meaningful solutions that ultimately benefit your team’s ability to build and deliver brilliant products.

In this article, we explore why conflict happens and how you can use it to demonstrate key values and behaviors within your product team.

Traditionally, access to data has been restricted to a few analysts in each organization who know how to interpret the data, translate it, and use it to help the company reach its business goals. The restriction was born out of security, necessity, and the lack of shared knowledge. 

But today’s world is increasingly data-driven and reserving this information for only a select few in your business is no longer an option.

Successfully launching a product requires a lot of testing—then more testing, and then testing again. 

Often, product testing is seen as a separate activity to product development. But when testing isn’t integrated into the product development process, product teams can miss the insights they need to ensure their products work smoothly and solve user problems.

Product change management is key in responding to dynamic market pressures and delivering solutions that meet evolving user needs—and product managers are familiar with the blockers that often arise in product or organizational change processes, from user confusion and employee resistance to breakdowns in cross-functional communication. 

Product change management is a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity—and one worth taking.

Product narratives should be grounded on clear, quantifiable data points; product teams have to use powerful statistics like revenue, active users, and retention rate as evidence to get buy-in for their vision. 

But data alone won’t create the emotional connection you need to captivate your users and convince your stakeholders.

In product management, backlog optimization is a key part of delivering high-quality products to users. Keeping your team’s backlog well-prioritized drives clear focus, streamlines workflow, and helps you deliver impactful products that delight customers.

Product managers are not the type to shy away from a challenge. Most product managers thrive with a fast-paced, varied product workflow. They live for the satisfaction of guiding a team through research, development, and execution to maximize customer delight.

But the varied, agile workflow that makes product management exciting is also what makes it uniquely challenging.

You know when you go to a buffet, and you want some of everything, but you can only carry as many plates as you have hands?

It’s not all that different from being a product manager sometimes.

User research is the driving force behind product experience insights and UX improvements. But where do you start?

Like most things, scrappy product management strategies have their pros and cons. Some product teams embrace them with open arms, while others shoo them out the door faster than you can say “release notes.”

In the second quarter of 2021, we surveyed our customers to get insights into their day-to-day experience working on a product team. We learned that organizational awareness is one of the most challenging aspects of being a product team member.

Continuous discovery—that is, continually gathering information on user needs to refine your product ideas—can result in happier customers, sharper priority lists, and a better product-market fit.

Collaboration and communication can lead to massive business success. Productivity increases when teams and individual contributors are connected, and businesses with effective communication strategies have the potential to outperform their competition.

Many product teams have a problem solution mindset, building features and experiences designed to solve a specific problem for a specific user.

That’s important, of course—but sustainable, lasting business growth means more than satisfying customers and meeting their expectations. Building customer delight into your product is what drives product-led growth.

As a product manager (PM), your job is to deliver a product users will love. But like most things in life, that's easier said than done.

Best practices and the latest design trends aren’t always going to work for your users. If your goals are to improve retention, provide a better user experience, and increase revenue, you need to A/B test your way to success.

Successful product management is more than just building a product: you’re also building a team.

The mix of multiple departments, new heads, skills, and goals can seem chaotic, but it doesn't have to be. With some foresight and preparation, you can grow a successful product management team—one that works together to build a product that truly delights your customers.