Hotjar team

We’ve opened up about workplace mental health. From psychological safety and burnout to mental rest days and perks aimed at your well-being. No new-age woo-woo here. Just practical tips and useful insights from our team that you and your team can try right away.

Difficult conversations are, well, difficult. But with the right preparation and perspective, they can be a little bit easier. Here are some tips from Dr. Hayley Lewis.

Remote work doesn't have to be isolating. Learn how Laura Wong, a Growth Product Manager at Hotjar, has started using anxiety parties as a tool to increase team trust and collaboration.

Are you ready to give feedback? Before you do, check your mindset, motivations, and hidden biases that could derail your message.

Private sector companies of all sizes have a crucial role to play in fighting climate change. Here are 10 ways companies can do more to fight climate change now.

Emotional intelligence is a skill. Several skills, actually. Learn the five components of EQ, and take note of your strengths, and what you may need to work on.

Empathy is like any other skill that can be improved with practice. Here are seven ways to build empathy and improve your workplace communication.

What does it take to be a great product manager? You’ve got to speak the language, know the territory, and develop the skills. Do you check these boxes?

While businesses have a larger role—and responsibility—in fighting climate change, the individual impact shouldn't be overlooked. After all, our personal choices do escalate to bigger results. What steps could you take now to generate less waste?

Best product management books. Great product managers never stop learning. Here are 10 top books on every PMs reading list. 

People have different opinions about remote work. But what’s actually true, and what’s unjustified legend? Here’s the truth about common remote work myths.

If you want to get real work done—and have a personal life—you have to set boundaries to protect your time and attention. Here are five ways to do it. 

We don’t confuse perks with gimmicks. We prioritize home-office space, human connection, mental health, and personal time and growth. And we’ve got the budgets to prove it.

Behavioral change specialist Kevin Groen shares actionable steps for dealing with defensiveness in the workplace (and in personal life).

It’s important for everyone in society to know about LGBTQIA+ flags and basic expressions.

Do you know the product manager (PM) lingo? Make sure you can talk the product manager talk with these PM acronyms.

What exactly are microaggressions? And why are they important to know about and address in the workplace?

We’ve scraped our own barrel of self-doubting inner-monologues, and it was painful. So we’ve added some tips to respond to the doubts. 

Building teams with divergent thought processes, thinking styles, and problem-solving approaches are also increasingly recognized as critical to success. This kind of variation is referred to as cognitive diversity. Here are 10 ways to help you rethink diversity at work.

Between product activity and your proposed solution is a gap. Do you fill it with assumptions, opinions, and guesses? Here’s a better way to do it.

Too many unproductive meetings? We’ve rounded up 8 common remote meeting pitfalls—along with 8 tips for designing meetings worth attending.

Scheduling a meeting? Wait! Before you do, make sure it’s a meeting that people will be happy to attend. Here’s a better-meeting checklist to help.

Learn more about why so many people fear giving and receiving feedback and how you can improve your own emotional intelligence for better workplace feedback.

We’re delighted to announce today that Contentsquare, Hotjar’s parent company, has raised $600 million in a Series F investment round.

We interviewed our People leaders, Sara Bent, Angela Buccitti, and Carol Veiga for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our hiring experience unique for both recruiters and candidates.

Hotjar's Saskia Everard shares her insights.

Can mindfulness really help reduce stress and improve attention? Yes. And it's easier than you think to get started with some simple practices at work. Here's how.

Hotjar’s 2022 Pride Panel highlighted the immense diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community, shining a spotlight on asexuality and personal stories from around the globe.

Feel like you never have time to get it all done? Maybe you need to take a break. Here’s how to unlock deep work time by prioritizing deep downtime.

When was the last time you took a mental health day? If your answer is never, find out why you should. And if you’re not sure how, or when, to take a day for yourself, we’ve got that covered, too.

Do you feel safe speaking up in front of your team? You don’t build trust through team-building exercises and stated values. Here are 11 ways to build trust in teams. 

Ever felt like you weren’t good enough, like you were an imposter in your own job? Us, too. So let’s talk about it—along with ways to overcome those fraudulent feelings.

Deciding between tools is never easy. There are endless features to compare, heaps of reviews to read through, and countless differences to consider. 

But don’t sweat. We’ve taken the time to detail the core differences between our products—so you don’t have to.

What’s your first thought when you hear 'company values'?

Many of us are immediately skeptical. For the cynics, values = platitudes, corporate lip service, and that meaningless sign you point new joiners to, never to think about again.

The new year is well underway. And by this time, many people’s New Year’s resolutions are well out of mind. 

But we don’t want that to happen to you. So we put together a list of 10 New Year’s resolutions web-olutions to help you stay tuned into the goals you’ve set for yourself, and the goals you may have forgotten to put on your list. 

Prioritizing product roadmaps, building trust with your team, and overcoming the biggest and baddest product obstacles. This, plus plenty more. 

So grab your notebook and let’s make sure this year counts.

Why do you work where you do? What made you want to work there? And now that you’re there, why do you decide to stay?

We sat down with Kristina Maleeva, our Sales team Lead for the Americas, to find out why Hotjar is where she calls home. We learned a lot about what makes Hotjar’s Sales culture unique, some company perks that you don’t hear every day, and an approach to remote work that actually works.

How much time do you spend a week in recurring meetings? How many of those are actually useful to you? If you’re like most product teams, I’m sure you’ve got your remote rituals pretty much nailed by now. Right? Sure.

At Hotjar, we’ve been doing this fully remote work thing since 2014. Yes, way before the pandemic hit. And to be honest, we still haven’t nailed it. But we have learned some things along the way that have helped.

Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team. 

As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.

Being a product manager can feel like being on safari. You’ve planned the route you want to take and you have your backpack full of tools ready—but changing environments and unpredictable creatures can derail your plans at any moment.

One of our values is that we challenge ourselves to grow. By hosting external speakers and sharing their ideas, we’re hoping to inspire you, our Hotjar community, to grow too. 

Hotjar was always going to be a remote company, long before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2014, when Hotjar began, our three founders all lived in Malta, yet they didn’t know how long they’d be there and where life would take them next.

So, they set out to create a remote company, and what better way to practice than by working from different corners of the island? It could’ve been easy to have a Meetup and work alongside each other, but David, Marc, and Jonathan started as they meant to go on.

Now, a few years and over 100 employees later, and in the spirit of one of our values—build trust with transparency—we’re ready to share some tips with the world. We asked Hotjarians about their experiences of working remotely and we’ve summarized them below.

A record number of people are leaving their jobs. It’s a phenomenon being called ‘The Great Resignation’, where more workers are planning to leave their jobs than ever before.

Some are pointing to the slow move to flexible or remote working as the main culprit. While on the other hand, some businesses have ignored this entirely and adopted the tactic of moving everyone right back into the office and returning to business as usual. (As a remote business, we don’t comply with this!)

Nevertheless, businesses are currently experiencing an exodus of talent. And on top of that, they’re having just as much trouble filling those empty seats.

A few weeks ago, we put Megan Murphy, the VP of Product at Hotjar, on the spot to answer our users’ burning questions.

In these two videos, Megan covers everything from how to get strategy buy-in to handling loud voices in meetings to whether she’d abandon everything to open a bar on the beach.

So, despite it not being in our usual format for our Building in Public video series, whether you’re an experienced Product Manager or looking to start your product career, there’s something in here for you.

The work of a product team never ends. There's no 'completion date' for growing revenue, reducing churn, increasing product usage, improving task completion, lowering the number of support tickets; and the list goes on.

But at the core of it lies the ultimate goal: to improve the user experience and create customer delight.

Would you believe that we managed to get every discipline equally excited about a single OKR? One that encouraged paying down some expensive tech debt, brought in some much-needed delight to a rather dull area of our product experience, and drove impressive business metrics—all at the same time?

Product feedback is one of a product management team’s most effective tools, but only when that feedback comes with the proper context.

Let’s take three product teams:

Team A ignores conversion metrics and focuses only on KPIs related to active users (MAU and DAU), retention (CRR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Team B is fixated on product conversion rates, using the numbers as a North Star for understanding features or pages that trigger or block user actions.

Team C pays close attention to conversion rates, but as a springboard for diving deeper, getting inside users’ heads, and understanding why they do or don’t take actions that lead to conversions.

There’s a clear winner here.

How do you measure a product manager’s performance? And how do you make sure the criteria you’re using is setting them up for a successful and rewarding career?

At Hotjar, we believe competency frameworks should be empowering. They should help others give feedback, provide transparent guidance about the expectations of a PM's role, and clearly signpost how they can reach the next step in their career.

Which one should you choose?

Imagine you’re running a brick-and-mortar store. From your perch at the counter, you can see and fix any issues the customers have as they move around the shop: if they have trouble navigating the aisles, you can make adjustments and help out; when they come up to the counter, you can strike up a conversation and learn who they are and what they’re looking for.

Hotjar vs Mouseflow: which one should your team choose?

If you’re in a product team (or just have a product-related hobby), we’ve got some exciting news for you. We’ve just launched the first episode of a new video series called Building in Public, where we share the secrets of how we build Hotjar—as we build Hotjar.

Watch the first episode—all about Hotjar’s product principles—right here:

You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.

But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?

You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?

Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how: 

At Hotjar, we believe that success shouldn’t be measured in profits alone, but rather in the contributions to all stakeholders; our team, customers, end-users, partners, the community, and the planet.

Which is why in 2017—on the Spanish coast at one of our bi-annual meetups—we announced that Hotjar would begin pledging 1% of our revenue to ‘giving back’. We didn’t have a solid plan on how we’d give, but we knew we wanted to do it in a meaningful way.

Continuously optimizing your website is critical to sustaining long-term growth. In the battle for visitors and conversions, one of your most valuable weapons is your ability to always iterate new and better versions of your website as user expectations (and the competitive landscape) evolve.

How well do you understand your prospects and customers? Do you know who they are, what keeps them awake at night, and what brought them to your business in search of a solution?

As part of Hotjar's month-long celebration activities this Pride Month, we held an LGBTQIA+ panel for the team—exploring how to show up for and represent LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace.

As a product manager, your job is to deliver a product your users love.

It seems simple when put that way, doesn’t it?

Traditional metrics like customer retention rate (CRR) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are good to know, but they don't tell you the whole story of customer churn. To really make a difference in your retention rate, you need to know why customers stop using your product—and how you can get them to stick with it.

Despite all the time you’ve spent perfecting your conversion funnel, visitors still aren’t converting. You’ve invested in your site's design and navigation, you've increased your marketing efforts, and you’re following all the 'best practices' for conversion optimization.

But if you don't understand how real customers shop online, you're missing an opportunity to optimize your ecommerce conversion funnel to reflect each visitor's unique customer journey.

Have you ever wondered what your users think of your website? Sure you have. But have you let your users inform (even dictate) your design process? If you're like a lot of website owners in the world, your answer might be: maybe.

Developing a product without user feedback is like having a relationship without conversation. (Not great.)

And while there are plenty of ways to learn about your users—like watching session recordings, A/B testing, and even scouring forums where they spend their time—online surveys are one of the best ways to get direct user feedback.

You spent months planning your online event, and now that it’s over, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast! After hosting an event, there’s one more thing you absolutely must do: send post-event surveys to your attendees.

Conferences are great. You get to meet people, learn stuff, not be at work for the day. Joyful.

But let’s be honest: most conferences you go to end up with the two best talks scheduled to clash, then three hours of killing time until the next good one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick and choose which talks happen, and when?

Building a SaaS product, app, or site?

If you’re a Product Creator in any capacity, the way you build your product will dictate the level of success you'll achieve. Like me, you’ve seen products and apps come and go. Some disappear as quickly as they arrive, and some (like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, et al) have achieved incredible success.

But, why is it that people get hooked on some products while others don't even make a ripple in the pond?

When you get on a website and read a wall of customer testimonials that gush with nothing but praise, it’s not surprising if your first reactions are skepticism or suspicion.

At Hotjar, we use Hotjar in everything we do.

Whether it’s building, writing, scaling, designing, or hiring - Hotjar helps us make Hotjar better. We’re firm believers of practicing what we preach (and we 100% believe in our product) so using Hotjar to grow Hotjar is a must for our team.

In June 2016 the Hotjar team flew in from all over the world to spend a week together on the gorgeous island of Malta (click here in case you’re wondering where it is).

Ask 10 marketers about marketing funnels and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Why is that? A marketing funnel isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy; your marketing funnel is uniquely tailored to how your buyer buys.

When you think about website conversions, you might think about percentages and averages that measure metrics and data points—like orders completed, subscription upgrades, and click-through rates.

But what do those metrics and data points actually tell you about your customers—the people you want to serve; the people you want to captivate, engage, and persuade?

If you want your visitors to keep returning to your website—to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and ultimately grow revenue—you need to understand what’s happening when they reach your site.

If you don’t understand your customers, it’s almost impossible to improve your product or service for them.

Online surveys make it easier than ever to get to know your users, but even a short, simple survey can leave you with a headache-inducing amount of user data to sort through.

So how do you make sense of it all?

Most startup founders dream of creating a single successful company.

David Cancel has done it 5 times.

His latest company, Drift, has already raised $107 million in funding and acquired over 70,000 active users in just 4 years.

So how did he do it?

The key has been a customer-driven methodology that David stumbled upon almost by accident at one of his previous companies.

Building a killer app is not a simple feat and requires relentless focus on what’s important not only for driving business but making our users happy. Our focus is on what will help them achieve their goals and eradicate pain points - their success is ours. With a limited number of resources at hand, how do we build a product that keeps our users happy without getting carried away with projects and features that add very little value?

Making the right choice when deciding what to work on next is crucial. A bad decision now could have a huge impact on how quickly you are able to scale or pivot later on. At Hotjar we ask ourselves three simple questions when deciding what we want to focus on:

Sticking an opt-in gate in front of your content and counting how many people go through it has become the go-to solution to measure lead generation and marketing success. But is inundating people with pop-ups that promise mind-blowing content in exchange for their email address really the best way to go about building your brand/business?

Ah, the user interview. Without a doubt one of the most valuable exercises you can run for understanding users better. But how can you, the interviewer, make sure you get the insights you need (and end up with a happy interviewee)? The first stage is understanding what this is—and what it isn’t.

Want to win over more customers? Make it easier for them to trust you.

A positive user experience helps you build and maintain a positive customer relationship—and product teams can help create a positive user experience that leads to sales, inspires repeat purchases, and encourages customers to recommend your brand to others.

If you’ve come here to learn more about Google Analytics heat maps, we have both good and bad news for you.

The bad news: Google stopped supporting its heatmap add-on in 2017, and recent reviews confirm that it doesn’t work anymore for a lot of users.

The good news: there's another way for you to get a free heatmap using Hotjar, and we guarantee it will work.

Determine short-term satisfaction levels at key moments in the customer journey

Find out how satisfied your customers are after purchasing on your website

Measure the usability and ease of use of your website

Dig deep into how customers use your product and find innovative ways to improve it

Learn more about your prospects and customers with over 70 different questions

Capture the people in your target audience and filter out users who don't fit your criteria

Get closer to your customers and their needs with 27 feedback questions

Find the sweet spot price for your product or service—not too high, not too low

Measure the usability and ease of use of your B2B product (UMUX Lite)

Improve your workplace by gathering actionable employee feedback at scale

Learn how to collect, analyze, and measure your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Increase customer retention by learning what makes them leave in the first place

Truly understand your target audience with these demographics questions

Spot issues, find opportunities, and prioritize your work by asking these 10 questions

Find out customers' perception of a resolved issue from the first contact with support

Find out the main needs and reasons why people use your product/service

Gather feedback before you launch your product with this survey for beta users

Does your messaging resonate? Find ways to improve your content with this survey

Get actionable feedback on your product so you know what to work on

Capture feedback before a visitor leaves your site and reduce your bounce rate

Building a brand new product? Learn more about your target users

Forget the guesswork and gather real buyers’ thoughts on your pricing plans

Find out how far your product satisfies the market's demand

Learn where your audience first heard about your brand

Find out why users are abandoning your product

Measure long-term customer loyalty and happiness the tried-and-tested way

What exactly does a product manager (PM) do in a day or a week? Are most days the same? This blog post will walk you through what a product manager gets up to in a day. 

Curious about the product management career trajectory? Learn how to break into and climb the ladder on the product management career path.

Is there a product marketer on your product team? If not, learn why including one in your product team structure is vital to product success.

Everyone wants ‘conversions.’ But what exactly is a website conversion? And how do you get more of them? Here are some goal-oriented examples.

Relying solely on quantitative analytic tools can lead to content reporting gaps. Here’s how to gain insight into how your marketing lands with your audience.

Is it possible to capture continuous customer feedback remotely? We say yes. Learn how we use continuous feedback loops to build better products customers love.

Struggling to increase website conversions? Learn how to increase clicks using CTA best practices and our downloadable checklist w/ power words that convert.

As a product manager or member of a product team, you’re responsible for making data-driven decisions that shape the future of your product. But with insights coming from dozens of sources, how do you find the time to sift through them? And how do you home in on the most important data to ensure you don’t miss anything crucial?

Continuous delivery and discovery help product teams learn more effectively and provide value to customers. 

But some teams have been hesitant to adopt these techniques because they aren’t sure how to properly balance delivery and discovery.

Let’s take a look at continuous delivery and continuous discovery: where they came from, how they’re different, and how an effective product team can strike the right balance to deliver customers the right product, in the right way, at the right time.

The average product team spends a huge amount of time juggling loads of different tasks, pressures, and demands. 

On an average day, urgent user requests and stakeholder asks pour in, meetings line up, the product backlog expands, and product team members find their best-laid plans changed or delayed.

Sound familiar? 

These pressures are intrinsic to product work, but if you let them grow, they’ll destroy your focus, strategy, and delivery. 

Luckily, they can be managed.

Great product teams bring together a variety of backgrounds, points of view, skills, and personalities, which is essential to building a successful team—but it can also lead to tension and conflict. 

However, with the right mindset and a thoughtful approach, conflict can inspire meaningful solutions that ultimately benefit your team’s ability to build and deliver brilliant products.

In this article, we explore why conflict happens and how you can use it to demonstrate key values and behaviors within your product team.

Traditionally, access to data has been restricted to a few analysts in each organization who know how to interpret the data, translate it, and use it to help the company reach its business goals. The restriction was born out of security, necessity, and the lack of shared knowledge. 

But today’s world is increasingly data-driven and reserving this information for only a select few in your business is no longer an option.

Successfully launching a product requires a lot of testing—then more testing, and then testing again. 

Often, product testing is seen as a separate activity to product development. But when testing isn’t integrated into the product development process, product teams can miss the insights they need to ensure their products work smoothly and solve user problems.

Product change management is key in responding to dynamic market pressures and delivering solutions that meet evolving user needs—and product managers are familiar with the blockers that often arise in product or organizational change processes, from user confusion and employee resistance to breakdowns in cross-functional communication. 

Product change management is a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity—and one worth taking.

Product narratives should be grounded on clear, quantifiable data points; product teams have to use powerful statistics like revenue, active users, and retention rate as evidence to get buy-in for their vision. 

But data alone won’t create the emotional connection you need to captivate your users and convince your stakeholders.

In product management, backlog optimization is a key part of delivering high-quality products to users. Keeping your team’s backlog well-prioritized drives clear focus, streamlines workflow, and helps you deliver impactful products that delight customers.

Product managers are not the type to shy away from a challenge. Most product managers thrive with a fast-paced, varied product workflow. They live for the satisfaction of guiding a team through research, development, and execution to maximize customer delight.

But the varied, agile workflow that makes product management exciting is also what makes it uniquely challenging.

You know when you go to a buffet, and you want some of everything, but you can only carry as many plates as you have hands?

It’s not all that different from being a product manager sometimes.

User research is the driving force behind product experience insights and UX improvements. But where do you start?

Like most things, scrappy product management strategies have their pros and cons. Some product teams embrace them with open arms, while others shoo them out the door faster than you can say “release notes.”

In the second quarter of 2021, we surveyed our customers to get insights into their day-to-day experience working on a product team. We learned that organizational awareness is one of the most challenging aspects of being a product team member.

Continuous discovery—that is, continually gathering information on user needs to refine your product ideas—can result in happier customers, sharper priority lists, and a better product-market fit.

Collaboration and communication can lead to massive business success. Productivity increases when teams and individual contributors are connected, and businesses with effective communication strategies have the potential to outperform their competition.

Many product teams have a problem solution mindset, building features and experiences designed to solve a specific problem for a specific user.

That’s important, of course—but sustainable, lasting business growth means more than satisfying customers and meeting their expectations. Building customer delight into your product is what drives product-led growth.

As a product manager (PM), your job is to deliver a product users will love. But like most things in life, that's easier said than done.

Best practices and the latest design trends aren’t always going to work for your users. If your goals are to improve retention, provide a better user experience, and increase revenue, you need to A/B test your way to success.

Successful product management is more than just building a product: you’re also building a team.

The mix of multiple departments, new heads, skills, and goals can seem chaotic, but it doesn't have to be. With some foresight and preparation, you can grow a successful product management team—one that works together to build a product that truly delights your customers.