How do you add release information to the different product analytics services?

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One of the holy events of product management is the feature release.

For some companies, it’s so important that they do only every 4-6 months. Others release features and changes multiple times during the day.

What’s exciting about a feature (change) is the sheer potential it has inside of it. It can improve things – a little bit or massively.

It is the start of an experiment. Over the next 4-6 weeks, you can follow every day if this feature brings improvements, nothing, or even decreases your metrics. If you do product analytics.

Here, an important part is that your product analytics setup knows about a release and these new features.

How do you add release information to the different product analytics services:

Amplitude – you can use the “Version” user property to pass a release version to Amplitude. Amplitude will automatically create a release entry (for the release timeline report). You can do this also manual within the release reporting. Or you can use the release API to send a request integrated into your build pipeline. Then you can use the impact report to analyze the feature performance.

Mixpanel – has not a release feature like Amplitude but something different interesting. You have an impact report, where you can define a launch (trigger) event (and a date) and then analyze the impact on different other events (e.g. start subscription). Therefore you could send an event for each new release (Release deployed) and use it as a launch event).

Heap – As far as I know, Heap has no explicit release handling (Joe Antelmi, Shelly Eisen-Livneh – let me know if I missed it) – but you can do the same approach we have mentioned above – use a user property and/or a specific release event.

PostHog – same as Heap, but they have an implementation for feature flags. This not only defines a new feature release but also lets you use it in your code to control who and how many should see it.

How do you work with feature release information in your analytics setup?