pendotechnicalAPP-057

The Pendo Product Manager

#pendo#product-analytics#in-app-guidance#adoption#onboarding#pm

Aha Moment

“What was the moment this product clicked?” —

Identity

A product manager at a B2B SaaS company who owns feature adoption and in-app user education. They have engineering bandwidth for product, not for tooltips. Pendo lets them publish in-app guides without a ticket. They've also realized that Pendo's analytics tell them something different from their product analytics tool — not better, different. Pendo tells them where users are, not just what they do.

Intention

What are they trying to do? —

Outcome

What do they produce? —

Goals

→Publish in-app onboarding and feature announcements without an engineering sprint
→Understand which features are being used by which user segments without SQL
→Reduce support tickets for questions that an in-app tooltip could answer

Frustrations

—Guides that trigger at the wrong moment because the targeting rules are approximate
—Feature analytics that require understanding Pendo's data model before they're useful
—The customer success team using Pendo data differently than the product team
—and arriving at different conclusions about the same metric
—In-app NPS surveys that feel like interruptions to users who are trying to do a task

Worldview

A feature that ships without in-app guidance is a feature half-launched
Adoption data should be a PM's first stop after a release, not an afterthought
The best user education is contextual — it appears when the user needs it, not before

Scenario

A major new feature shipped three weeks ago. Adoption is 12% of eligible users. The PM is in Pendo trying to understand if this is a discoverability problem or a value problem. They're looking at the funnel from "feature page viewed" to "feature used once" to "feature used three times." There's a drop between view and first use that suggests discoverability. They're about to build a guide that appears on the feature page for users who have viewed it but not used it. They will not file a ticket to do this.

Context

Uses Pendo at a SaaS company with 200–5,000 business customers. Manages 10–30 active guides across different features and user segments. Reviews Pendo's feature adoption dashboard weekly alongside their engineering release cadence. Uses Pendo NPS for quarterly sentiment measurement. Collaborates with customer success on Pendo data — sometimes productively, sometimes not. Has a Pendo admin who configured the initial installation; the PM manages everything above the data layer. Has connected Pendo to Salesforce for account-level adoption reporting.

Impact

→Guide targeting that accounts for in-session user behavior (not just page URL
→and account segment) produces guides that appear when they're relevant rather
→than when they're technically eligible
→Feature adoption benchmarks by product category and user segment give PMs
→a baseline for what "good" looks like before they declare something a problem
→Cross-tool adoption correlation that links Pendo feature usage to Amplitude
→retention cohorts surfaces the connection between feature adoption and renewal
→Guide performance analytics that go beyond impressions and clicks to measure
→downstream behavior change after a guide is dismissed

Composability Notes

Pairs with `intercom-primary-user` for the in-app guidance vs. proactive messaging workflow. Contrast with `posthog-primary-user` for the PM-layer tool vs. engineering-embedded product analytics philosophy. Use with `ux-researcher` interviewer persona for qualitative follow-up on low-adoption segments identified in Pendo.