What is Product Net Promoter Score ® (pNPS)

Product Net Promoter Score (pNPS) is a metric to measure the loyalty and advocacy of your products' users. pNPS indicates how likely your users are to share your product with their peers and can help you to determine your potential for organic growth.

Product Net Promoter Score is widely used among product and service companies along with the traditional Net Promoter Score (NPS) since both metrics are easy to measure. Also, it is an affordable way to test hypotheses and market fit.

pNPS vs NPS

pNPS and NPS ask the same question related to how likely people are to recommend your product and service to their friends and family. The difference is to whom you are asking this question. NPS is targeting decision-makers while pNPS is focused on actual product users.

A standard NPS question is asked to the people who are decision-makers when it comes to choosing your product or service. These can be managers, supply chain managers, executives, or team leaders. In other words, there is no guarantee that these people are actually using your product or service on a daily basis.

As for the pNPS question, it is asked directly to the people who are working with your product on daily basis. For software products, it can often be developers, designers, accountants, or any other domain expert.

Of course, there can be cases when the person in charge of purchasing a product is also the one who is actively using it. Such cases make it easier for you to measure pNPS and NPS since you combine them under NPS.

Should you measure both? Yes, because your NPS and pNPS can be very different and you want to make sure that both parties are happy with the product and service you provide. Leaving one party behind can result in your product losing customers over time due to complaints.

To illustrate it better, imagine you have an awesome product for tracking issues. Web developers love your software but it is highly-priced. Agency owners may use your software but will constantly look for alternatives due to high costs and your NPS won't be high.

On the other hand, cheap software may be appealing to agency owners but web developers will hate to use it due to bugs or critical functionality missing. Over time, they will convince stakeholders to drop the software since it will impact the performance and quality of their work.

How and when to collect and measure pNPS?

Taking into account the nature of pNPS it is important to acknowledge the right place and time to ask the question.

It will require time for users to investigate your product or service. It is pointless to ask pNPS question right at the beginning as they won't be able to give you an answer. At the same time, don't wait too long as you want to get the first impression.

Of course, just like with NPS, you will have to repeat your survey after some time to get pNPS for mature users.

The second important part is where to ask for pNPS. As it is targeted to address users, you need to ask for pNPS right in the product or while providing services.

While it may sound complicated, most NPS surveys provide snippets you can easily integrate in your products. With that said, to measure pNPS you can use a default NPS survey software and only target different segment.

As for the calculation of pNPS, you will use a traditional NPS formula with subtracting detractors from promoters.

Conclusions

While pNPS is not that widely discussed in the industry, it is an important measurement when it comes to building successful products.

Knowing your pNPS along with NPS can give you an advantage over competing products and services and target parts of your product more specifically.

It is also beneficial for startup owners to focus on pNPS to quickly test hypotheses and go to market with solution appreciated by the end users.