A feature audit is an easy-to-use but powerful product management tool that provides businesses with a quick snapshot of their product's feature usage.
Using a graph that plots customer activity on two axes — popularity (X) and frequency (Y) — they outline which features are performing well and which may need more attention.
This allows businesses to analyze their product’s efficiency and make improvements where they’re most needed.
Knowing how many people are actually using each of your product’s features is product management 101. This knowledge can help you to understand the overall performance of your product, guide your team’s efforts, and inform sound decisions to facilitate business growth.
But when it comes to actually understand a feature audit, not many people know where to start.
In its simplest form, a feature audit will plot out all of a product’s features on two axes: X (how many people use a feature, i.e. popularity), and Y (how often, i.e. frequency).
The core of your product is situated in the top right, these features are most popular and most frequently used.
The top left represents the features used often but only by few people, indicating either a badly adopted feature that needs work, or a niche feature that only a few engage with.
Any features left in the lower quadrants are clearly receiving low engagement. You may need to considerably improve these features, or discard them altogether.
Before you cut anything, though, you should undergo more user testing to understand the root cause behind low engagement.