By Carl Edwards
Product roadmaps have a funny habit of getting very full, very quickly. There is always another feature to add, another integration to consider, another workflow to improve and, naturally, at least one conversation about AI, because apparently it now has a reserved seat in every product meeting.
But while everyone is looking ahead to the next big thing, some of the biggest opportunities for product growth are often sitting right under our noses. The real question is whether customers can actually use the information your product already holds, or whether it’s just quietly gathering digital dust in the background.
Most Products Capture Data. Far Fewer Create Understanding.
Almost every software platform generates valuable information: customer activity, usage trends, performance metrics, operational data, commercial data and plenty more besides. Most products are very good at collecting it. If anything, they’re slightly too good at it.
The problem is what happens next. In many organisations, valuable information still gets trapped behind exported reports, spreadsheets and manual analysis. Someone downloads the data, someone builds a report, the report gets emailed around, questions get asked, another report gets created and before you know it, the spreadsheet becomes the unofficial centre of the business. There are half a dozen versions, each claiming to be the latest, and nobody feels entirely confident they’re looking at the same numbers.
Why Customers Still Export Everything To Excel
This is one of the most common frustrations I see. Companies invest heavily in software platforms, yet many customers still export data into spreadsheets. It’s easy to assume that’s because users have some deep emotional attachment to Excel. Most don’t. They’re not exporting data because they love pivot tables quite that much.
What they’re really doing is trying to answer questions the product isn’t helping them answer, such as why a number changed, which customers are driving a trend, whether performance is improving or declining, what deserves attention next and whether they can trust what they’re seeing.
Traditional reporting tells people what happened. What customers increasingly want is help understanding what to do next.
The Change That’s Happening Across Software
Twenty years ago, software primarily helped people complete tasks. A CRM managed contacts, an ERP managed transactions and a portal gave people access to information. Very useful, very sensible, very “does what it says on the tin”.
Today, expectations have moved on. Customers want products to do more than record activity. They want context, direction and answers built into the experience, whether that’s in a SaaS product, customer portal, partner platform or client-facing application.
The Problem With Traditional BI
For a long time, BI did exactly what businesses needed it to do: it pulled information together and made it visible. That was a big step forward. The trouble is that visibility alone no longer feels enough when most teams already have more charts, metrics and colourful tiles than they know what to do with.
That is where the old model starts to creak a little. A user spots something in a report, wants to understand what is behind it, then has to go hunting through filters, tabs, exports or, more likely, ask someone in the data team to take a look. By the time the answer comes back, the original question has usually brought three friends with it.
Where Embedded Analytics Changes Things
This is where embedded analytics becomes valuable. Not as a shiny dashboard section bolted onto the side, but as a way to bring useful answers into the places where customers are already working.
Embedding analytics into customer portals, SaaS applications, partner platforms and reporting systems gives users a clearer route from question to answer. Instead of exporting information and analysing it elsewhere, they can explore performance in the flow of the product itself.
The best implementations don’t feel like analytics at all. They simply feel like part of the product, which is exactly the point.
Why This Creates Competitive Advantage
The software market is crowded, and most products have similar feature lists and solve similar operational problems. What often separates one product from another is whether it helps customers see, understand and feel the pulse of their business, faster.
When customers rely on your platform not only to do the work, but to make better decisions around that work, the relationship changes. The product becomes harder to replace — not because you’ve locked customers in, but because you’ve become genuinely useful in their day-to-day thinking.
The Difference Between Useful and Essential
I think many software companies recognise the value of analytics. What often gets overlooked is how deeply those insights are woven into the product experience.
Most products help customers do something. The opportunity is helping them to understand something.
When your product becomes the place customers go to understand their business, their customers or their performance, you’re no longer competing solely on features.
You’re competing on value.