Product analytics practice exercise for product managers

What is the challenge scenario?

Kai joined Fieldly six weeks ago as its first product manager. Fieldly is a B2B SaaS tool that helps field service companies, think HVAC, utilities and facilities management, run inspections, log site visits and close jobs from mobile.

Last week the CEO came back from a board meeting with one slide circled in red: activation rate, 30 percent. The board's read was that the product is not working. The CEO's read was that the product team does not understand its users. Kai pulled the dashboard and found the real problem: active is defined as any account that logged in at least once in the last 30 days, which includes accounts that opened the app once, got confused, and never came back. Nobody had defined activation. Nobody had agreed what active means. Nobody was tracking why users dropped off, only that they did.

The exercise states the underlying principle plainly: a metric that cannot change a decision should not exist, and an activation rate built on the wrong definition is worse than no activation rate at all. Kai's job, and yours, is to rebuild Fieldly's analytics foundation from scratch.

What are you asked to do?

Define Fieldly's real activation event at the account level, naming the ideal user, the setup event, the actual moment of value, and how you would measure it. Write an instrumentation plan for six specific events, from a user viewing the signup page through a completed inspection, giving each one a snake case name, two or three properties, its group, and whether you would also track a failure variant. Read three cohort retention patterns, decide which of the row, column or diagonal view reveals each one, and say what action each pattern should trigger. Define a Product Qualified Lead across three components: real usage signals, an ideal customer profile filter, and how you would tell a product sourced lead from a product influenced one. Finish with a five stage scorecard, two metrics per stage, where each metric is tied to a specific decision someone would actually make.

What does a strong answer cover?

This bootcamp does not publish a rubric for its practical challenge, so check your own answer against the curriculum's own questions instead of a worked solution:

• Does the activation definition point to a specific account level event, not just a login?
• Does the instrumentation plan use real event, property and group names, not vague categories like tracking usage?
• Does the cohort reading distinguish a lifecycle drop off from an onboarding improvement from a one time event, using the right view for each?
• Does the PQL combine a real usage signal with an ideal customer profile filter, rather than usage alone?
• Does every metric on the final scorecard tie to a decision someone would actually make, with the broken legacy metrics removed rather than reused?

Skills this exercise practises

Defining an account level activation event, writing a real instrumentation plan with event and property names, reading cohort retention data across three different views, and building a Product Qualified Lead definition that Sales can actually act on.

Which bootcamp does this challenge come from?

This is the practical challenge from Product Analytics, Builders Camp's one week bootcamp on mastering B2B product analytics in a product led growth environment, led by Mário Araújo across two 90 minute live sessions. Completing it counts toward that bootcamp's certificate. The North Star metric examples guide is a natural next stop if the scorecard step in this exercise is the part you want more practice with, and the RICE prioritization framework guide helps once you need to turn analytics findings into a prioritized roadmap. The SMART goals practice exercise elsewhere in this series practises the companion skill of turning a metric into a tracked objective.

Builders Camp runs live and self paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Product Analytics bootcamp for current cohort dates and the full self paced curriculum.