From a customer standpoint, calendar aims to replace a personal assistant. Think of a personal assistant who knows what’s important for you, schedules meetings, reminds you. Essentially Calendar aims to provide that experience. In that sense, I would expect that the mission for google calendar is to improve your personal time management and personal productivity.

 

How will you measure improvement in time management or personal productivity?

Ideally, we can ask the user and ask how effective is the calendar – for e.g, thats what you would do if you have to evaluate a personal assistant. But thats not scalable. So we need proxies for measuring personal productivity

 

Before I dive in, lets also look at the customer segments. Its mainly (a) Users in SMBs, enterprises who are basically using Calendar for work time management (b) Consumers who are using Calendar for personal time management. While the features can be different for both, I dont think the idea of “improving your personal productivity” is different. So northstar should still be the same.

 

Lets look at the customer journey, look at what metrics are important at each stage, and then we can find out whats the key metric across the entire journey. Lets focus on time management for working professionals.

 

1/ Am I scheduling the right meetings/events on my calendar? For this, we first need my schedule to be on Google Calendar, only then calendar can even attempt to “determine” what are important meetings/events for me. By meetings/events I mean meeting other people or just time I am blocking off to work on something important to me.

Metric: a/ Amount of time scheduled on calendar as % of total work week.

b/ Amount of time scheduled for “right meetings” as % of total work week.

 

2/ Am I going to the meetings?

a/ For the right meetings, % of meetings actually happening and I joined.

 

3/ Am I finding the meetings useful?

a/ Feedback after the meeting, if this was the meeting was important enough for me attend. Basically validating step (1) if the meeting classification was correct. The meeting doesnt need to be productive – but was it a meeting where my presence was needed. For e.g, the meeting may have ben run badly, but it was important for me to fix it?

b/ % of time spent in “right meetings” per week.

 

Northstar metric should be: % of time of spent in “right meetings” per week. This metric may not be measurable right now. But thats the metric we need to aim for and build features to reach a stage where we have a way to measure that metric and keep optimizing it.

WHat features will you build to measure this metric?

1/ First we need entire work week to be on the calendar even the time which I am blocking off to do focused work. Key metric: % of work week scheduled on calendar.

This is easily measurable.

2/ Lets assume that all the meetings are important for now. We need a way to find out if they actually went to the meeting, or did the personal task they have blocked out time for. If we can get this signal, then it means that the meeting/task was sufficiently important for them to show up. Helps us learn how to identify (1).

If there is a google meeting invite, if I went to google meeting, then we know that you attended.

 

Else, maybe we can prompt the user when we remind them, asking for “are you planning to attend this meeting, or finish this task”. It will be difficult to get users to respond. But we need to find a way to convince users that calendar is not some passive tool, but a living breathing assistant who can help them.

Google’s aim is to organize the world’s information to make it accessible to users. Google calendar is part of the suite of applications that Google provides to both consumers and enterprise users to achieve this goal. The calendar app helps users organizes their time to achieve the most out of it.

Clarifying questions

1. Calendar is available for enterprise as part of the g-suite and free version for the general public. Are we looking to define the north start for the free version as the enterprise users are bound to use the calendar as that allows them to see everyone else’s calendar in the org? – yes

Google Calendar is a fairly established product with wide market adoption. It is highly integrated with other Google applications like email, chat and meet. At this stage of the product, the company would be more concerned with engaging and retaining its existing customers.

Let’s look at the typical use case for Google calendar and try to define the important metrics around engagement and retention. We’ll then go on to gauge their usefulness and arrive at the north star.

There are majorly two types of users from the perspective of the calendar app, those who set up and attend the meeting and those who have to just attend the meetings at the scheduled time.

 

User Journey

1. User opens the calendar app

2. Looks at the availability of the time slots that he wishes to schedule a meeting with

3. Adjusts the setting of the meeting if required, adds an agenda and sends out the invite

4. user RSVP a meeting request

5. Joins the meeting

7. Sends out MOMs/AIs as defined during the meeting using the invite on the calendar

Let’s look at the important metrics across all these steps

Step MetricsImportance

Opens Google Calendar	Engagement – 1. Number of Sessions per day per user and growth Retention. DAU, WAU and MAU	High and easy to collect
Looks at available slots	Engagement – 1. Number of meetings scheduled in a day per user and trend 2. Avg time taken to find a slot (more time is not good) Retention – Repeat numbers of users that try to schedule a meeting	1 -High and easy to collect 2. Med and medium difficulty
adjust the setting and adds agenda sends out invite	Engagement –  1. % of meeting scheduled with default settings 2. % of meeting with a description 3. % of meetings edited  post sending first invite (changes to setting) 4. % of meetings without any guest per user per week 5. % of all meetings without any guest Retention – 1. Number of users setting meetings with default setting per day/week/month 2. Number of users editing meetings post setting per day/week/month 3. Number of users setting meetings without any gues per day/week/month 4. Number of users with scheduled meeting per day/week/month	1. Important (could affect retention as well if too many actions need to be taken) 2. Important – easy to capture, high impact 3. Important and medium to capture data 4 and 5 –> important to gauge users trying to manage their with using the calendar
accepts/rejects invite	Engagement – 1. % of meetings with guests RSVP 2. Avg number of meeting RSVP per user Retention – 1. Number of user RSVP per day/week/month	IMportant as this increase the overall experience of the user
Joins the meeting	Engagement – 1. % of all meetings attended 2. % of users that accept and attends a meeting 3. % meetings rescheduled less than 10 mins before start Retention – 1. Number of users with scheduled meetings attending in a day/week/month 2. Number of meeting with Scheduledmeeting	Important, difficult to capture 3 – important and easy

As established earlier we have focused on Engagement and Retention as this product has matured.

The most important metics to track are the number of users using the app and gaining value so I would look at

1. Number of calendar sessions per day per user

2. Number of users creating a meeting per week

3. Number of users with any scheduled meeting per week

4. Number of meetings created per user per week

 

The most valuable aspect of the calendar would be successfully attending a meeting but that could be difficult to accurately track so the North start that I would like to track would be:

1. Number of users creating a meeting week

Guard rail metrics – 1.  Number of meetings created per user per week

2. Number of users with any meeting scheduled per week

I would also like to draw on the kind of experience a user has while using the Calendar by the type of interaction that they have. For instance, if they have to cancel/decline/reschedule/edit a lot of meeting it would tell us that users are not able to get the desired output in 1 go. Although these would be secondary metrics

1. Number of meetings declined per user per week

2. % of all meetings edited

Question

What’s the northstar metric for Google Calendar?

 

Clarifying questions?

When you say Google Calendar, I think of the free service that comes with my Google account as well as the paid version that comes as part of G-Suite.  Would you like me to focus on a segment?  Let’s assume that we focus on the free service and not g-suite.

When I think of google calendar there are multiple parts like appointment setting, scheduling, multi-party meetings, should I drill into a specific part or think of the service holistically?  Please think of the service holistically.

Describe the product

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds information and make it accessible and useful.  To that end Google calendar is a means of organizing the worlds time and scheduling, one user at a time.  That we can see our organized time on phones, computers, push notifications and reminded by Google assistant – this makes it accessible and useful.

User Journey

1. User gets a google account (likely for email)
2. User opens calendar
3. User sets a calendar item
4. User invites others to calendar
5. User attends meeting

Attach metrics to each step of the user journey

Journey Step	Metric	Impact on the user	Company goals	Confidence in Metric	Ease of collection	Connection to Google Calendar
User gets a google account (likely for email)	Awareness – % of users that know calendar is included	High	High	This is an awareness and may be hard to measure	Medium – as a straight awareness measure, we may have to do survey’s or other data collection not just measure user actions.	High
User gets a google account (likely for email)	Awareness – % of users that click on the 9 dot Google apps icon	High	High	High	Easy	Low – just clicking on the icon does not mean the user will use Google Calendar – it shows the user to aware there are other apps
User opens calendar	Activation % of google account users that open calendar ever and time sequence	High	High	High	Easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard
User opens calendar	Engagement / Retention avg number of times users opens calendar during a period   Can time sequence the metric to show if usage is going up or down	High	High	High	easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard.  We will likely have to segment active users vs all users
User sets a calendar item	Engagement % of users that set a calendar item	High	High	High	easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard.  We will likely have to segment active users vs all users
User sets a calendar item	Engagement Number of calendar items set per period	High	High	High	easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard.  We will likely have to segment active users vs all users
User sets a calendar item	Retention  % of users that set a calendar item period over period	High	High	High	easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard.  We will likely have to segment active users vs all users
User sets a calendar item	Retention Number of calendar items set per period over period	High	High	High	easy	This is an important metric that we will track and will be on the dashboard.  We will likely have to segment active users vs all users
User sets a calendar item	Engagement – % of time managed by Google calendar.	High	High	High	easy	As a holistic view – how many hours or percent of day do users manage using calendar.
User invites others to calendar item or is invited	We could create a host of metrics related to multi invite calendar items – I do not believe they will be NorthStar metrics.  A user could organize all their time in calendar and never invite anyone that user will still be a very successful calendar user – I think these will be supporting metrics.
User attends a meeting	We could create a host of metrics related to attendance.  I do not believe they will be NorthStar metrics.  A user could organize all their time in calendar and we won’t know if they attended.  Maybe we could measure do users open the calendar item in close time proximity to the meeting.  But I have calendar invites that simply give me push notifications that I never open – a  user can still be a very successful calendar user and never open the invites again.  – I think these will be supporting metrics.

 

Note a few metrics I did not talk about. monetization and referral.  Monetization for Calendar seems to be indirect.  There are not any ads in Calendar so  its more about having users in the eco system which leads them to other monetization moments for Google.  I also didn’t talk about referral – it is likely that when you invite someone to a meeting it may be a form of referral.  But again, I could be a solitary calendar user so this seems like a supporting metric.

Summary

I think the primary metrics for Calendar is like a funnel

% of Google users that open calendar

% of users that set a calendar appointment

Number of calendar items set per user

If you time sequence these metrics, then you can then see health and growth.

If I had to pick a single NorthStar metric I think the % of users that set a calendar appointment is it.

This shows engagement, if time sequenced it show retention, it can be sliced by user activity, demographics, geography and shows engagement and retention by user segment.  I think it is better than % of users that open calendar because opening is different than using.  I think it is better than items per users because that metric only shows usage, not changes to the number of users.  You could have that number of calendar items per user spike while the total number of users falls and not know that the ecosystem was collapsing.