How to track your features' retention

Retention metrics, often simplified as the percentage of users who return after a certain period, can actually be defined more broadly, allowing for greater flexibility and specificity in understanding user behavior. By defining retention as the ratio of users who perform action A during time period T0 and action B during T1, where A and B can be any user interactions and T0 and T1 are any time frames, businesses can gain insights into which product features drive user retention or churn. The complexity of choosing appropriate actions and time periods involves balancing specificity with sample size and considering the meaningfulness of repeated feature usage. Additionally, seasonality and expected user engagement patterns play crucial roles in tailoring retention metrics, as different contexts require different approaches to measure and interpret activity. Tools like Statsig's Metrics Explorer facilitate this process by enabling users to create custom feature retention dashboards, allowing for the monitoring of specific user interactions and providing options to view data on daily or weekly scales.