Google’s Heart Framework for Product Metrics

Rohit Verma
4 min readMay 6, 2021

Let’s move to the next widely popular framework — Google’s Heart Framework. It is quite customer-centric as it examines engagement , situation , & feelings of the users which shape the customer experience during their interaction with the product. These set of metrics are quite helpful in decision making during the product development process.

HEART framework is based upon 5 metrics : Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.

Let’s discuss each of them in detail.

Happiness 🤩

Information captures through surveys, customer rating & reviews on playstore or the TPS/ NPS depicts the ease of use, satisfaction derives by the user through the interaction with your product. However, there is a caveat , a short term tracking & analysis won’t reap results here. For instance, launching a dark mode without a pitch dark option might receive backlash from users however after a considerable period of time, users might be elated with a dark mode option with enhanced pitch dark theme as well.

Engagement 🤝

Engagement is measured through various metrics such as time spent by users on the app, no. of visits per user, conversion rate, etc. It measures the extent of users’ attention investment into the product. Basically the usage of the app is measured through the intensity, frequency, & profundity of interaction over a particular duration of time.

Adoption 🏃‍♀️

This metric is define as “ Product’s potential to capture new users over a span of time “. For instance, as a PM of an App, you will track no. of new users who have installed your app, sign up & have done a successful login. This enables the ability of the product to gauge the users interest in your product & how that can be further enhanced through tracking of Adoption metrics.

Retention 🧲

Retention metrics are the secret sauce for the success of your product. The most popular metrics are the Daily Active Users ( DAU ), Weekly Active Users ( WAU ), Monthly Active Users ( MAU ). It’s crucial to note how your product is able to manage the churn rate successfully over a period of time. No. of users who remain active & engage consistently with your product define the value proposition of your offerings.

Task Success ✅

Users are deriving value out of your product because they are able to achieve their goals and complex tasks. This metric is able to bring objectivity to this process by measuring Error Rate, Failure rate, APR ( App Not Responding ) rate. It also measures the effectiveness of the tasks & corresponding efficiency of the tasks as well. For instance , user makes an attempt to do a login using biometric — Was the user successful in login in one attempt? , how many retries it took ?, such metrics helps to define a success criteria for each task.

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Rohit Verma

Group Product Manager @AngelOne, ex-@Flipkart, @Cleartrip @IIM Bangalore. https://topmate.io/rohit_verma_pm