Product Engagement Score (PES)

What is a product engagement score? 

The product engagement score (PES) is like your product’s pulse check. It’s one number that has the power to tell you everything when it comes to understanding how engaged your users really are. Instead of drowning in a sea of different engagement metrics, PES simplifies the chaos by rolling up three key factors into one easy-to-track score. Those three metrics: adoption, stickiness, and growth.

In plain English, your product engagement score (PES) tells you how well your product is resonating with users. Are they discovering and using key features (this is adoption)? Are they coming back regularly because they find it valuable (this is stickiness)? Is your user base expanding instead of quietly ghosting you (this is growth)? 

PES pulls all of this together into a single number, giving you a quick yet powerful way to track whether your product is thriving or if you need to sound the alarm and make some changes.

The product engagement score is no vanity metric, either. PES can highlight what’s working, reveal hidden issues, and even help predict customer churn before it happens. The higher your score, the more engaged your users, and the more likely they are to stick around, advocate for your product, and, you know, actually pay for it.

How does a product engagement score work?

Let’s look deeper at how this score actually works and how you can create one yourself for your own product. Product engagement score combines three core engagement metrics into one tidy number that tells you whether users are loving, leaving, or lurking in your product. 

Those three key metrics?

• Product adoption – How many users are actively adopting key features?
• Product stickiness – How often do they keep coming back for more?
• Product growth – Is your user base expanding or quietly vanishing?

Once you’ve got these rates, PES is simply the average of the three. Yes, it’s basic maths: add them up, divide by three, and boom, you’ve got your PES. But before you start crunching numbers, let’s break down how to calculate each component the right way.

How to find your product adoption rate

Product adoption is all about how many users are actually engaging with your core features. It goes beyond tracking those who are just signing up and then peacing out. If a feature is central to your product value proposition you want to know how many users are making it part of their routine.

Here’s how to calculate it:

This gives you a clear measure of whether your users are making the most of your product’s key capabilities or if you need to work on improving onboarding, feature discoverability, or even the usefulness of the features themselves.

Want more detail? Check out our adoption rate glossary entry.

How to find your product stickiness

Stickiness is your retention superglue, it tells you how often users return after that first interaction. A product that’s “sticky” keeps pulling users back in, meaning they’re finding continuous value.

There are two common ways to measure stickiness, depending on how often your product is meant to be used:

• Daily Active Users (DAU) ÷ Weekly Active Users (WAU) – For products that are used daily, like messaging apps or Product Management tools.
• Weekly Active Users (WAU) ÷ Monthly Active Users (MAU) – For products that are designed for less frequent use, like invoicing software.

The result is a percentage (well, actually a decimal that you can turn into a percentage) that shows how often people are returning relative to your overall user base. High stickiness? Your product is essential. Low stickiness? Time to investigate friction points or missing value props.

How to find your product growth

Product growth tells you if you’re winning new users – or losing them faster than you can say “churn.” It’s a mix of new users, returning users, and those who’ve disappeared.

Here’s the formula:

• New users – Fresh signups or new accounts.
• Recovered users – Previously inactive users who’ve come back.
• Churned users – Those who’ve left (hopefully not forever).

A positive growth rate means your product is expanding. A negative one? Time to investigate onboarding, activation, and why users are dropping off.

Putting it all together

Once you have your three metrics as a percentage: adoption, stickiness, and growth – simply add them together and divide by three. That’s your Product adoption score, expressed as a percentage out of 100.

📈 The higher the Product adoption score, the more engaged your users are.
🚨 The lower it is, the more work you’ve got to do.

A solid PES means users are discovering, returning, and growing with your product – the trifecta of a thriving SaaS product. If that’s not happening, you now know exactly where to dig in and optimize.

Why use a product engagement score?

Your product engagement score is a window into how well your product is resonating with users. A high PES means users are adopting key features, sticking around, and driving organic growth. A low PES? That’s like a flashing check engine light showing that something’s off, whether it’s onboarding friction, underutilized features, or a churn problem in the making.

By tracking PES, you gain actionable insights into user behavior, allowing you to make informed decisions that drive retention, expansion, and overall product success. Here’s why it’s a must-have metric:

1. Identifying expansion revenue opportunities

Not all user segments engage with your product in the same way. A low PES in a growing segment might indicate that users aren’t fully making use of premium features – a prime opportunity for upsells and expansion revenue. 

If you notice that adoption and stickiness are strong, but growth lags behind, it could mean you’re missing opportunities to introduce power users to additional features or higher-tier plans. This calls for a rethink of your product pricing strategy.

2. Uncovering product-qualified leads (PQLs)

A spike in PES within certain new user segments? That’s your cue to identify Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs): users who are already finding value in your product and are primed for conversion. Instead of chasing cold leads, your Sales Team can prioritize accounts that are actively engaging with core features, making for a much smoother conversion process.

3. Reducing customer churn

A low engagement score in certain user segments is often the first sign of trouble, whether it’s a clunky onboarding process, underwhelming feature adoption, or a lack of perceived value. By catching declining PES early, you can intervene before users churn. This could mean tweaking your user activation flow, introducing proactive customer support, or re-engaging users with targeted content.

4. Improving the overall product experience

Engagement isn’t just about keeping users active – it’s about making sure they’re getting value. A well-tracked PES helps pinpoint underperforming areas of your product, so you can refine features, remove friction, and enhance usability. If adoption is low for a key feature, is it too hidden? Too complex? Not meeting user expectations? PES helps answer those questions.

How do I improve my product engagement score?

Say you’ve worked out your PES and it’s not a pretty picture. What do you do? Well, boosting your product engagement score (PES) is all about making your product more intuitive, engaging, and valuable to users. 

Improving your PES isn’t about chasing a number – it’s about ensuring your product delivers real value to users at every stage of their experience. The more intuitive, engaging, and essential your product becomes, the higher your engagement score (and customer retention) will climb. 

Here are some practical ways to increase adoption, stickiness, and growth – aka the three pillars of PES.

• Enhance new user adoption with better onboarding 🚀
  First impressions matter. A seamless onboarding experience helps users reach their “wow moment” faster, increasing their likelihood of sticking around. Interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and personalized guidance can ensure new users understand how to use key features right away, leading to higher activation and engagement rates.
• Introduce secondary onboarding for deeper engagement 🔄
  Not every feature needs to be introduced on day one. Secondary onboarding helps reactivate users by guiding them toward advanced features they may have missed. This approach boosts long-term engagement and product adoption, while also reducing churn by reinforcing value over time.
• Provide in-app self-service support 💡
  Users shouldn’t have to leave your product to get help. Embedding a resource center, tooltips, or FAQs within the app makes it easier for users to troubleshoot issues, reducing frustration and improving overall satisfaction – both of which contribute to better product engagement scores.
• Leverage gamification to drive ongoing interaction 🎮
  People love a good challenge. Leaderboards, badges, and progress tracking can make using your product feel more rewarding. By incorporating game-like mechanics, you can encourage repeat usage and long-term engagement, keeping adoption and stickiness high.
• Implement churn prevention measures ⚠️
  Spotting disengaged users before they leave is key. Use in-app nudges, personalized emails, or targeted experiences for users showing signs of churn (like a drop in logins or feature usage). Churn surveys can also help you uncover why users are leaving, giving you the insights needed to improve retention and PES.
• Use micro-surveys to gather real-time feedback 📊
  Small, well-timed in-app surveys help you understand where users struggle and what they find valuable. These insights can guide future improvements, ensuring your product continues to meet user needs and drive engagement.
• Identify and promote high-value features 🎯
  Not all features are created equal. Dig into product analytics to determine which features are most used by high-retention customers. Once identified, use in-app messaging or prompts to guide new users toward these valuable features, ensuring they experience the core benefits of your product sooner.
• Make your product an essential part of users’ daily routines 🔗
  The more integrated your product is into a user’s day, the stickier it becomes. Use behavioral data and user interviews to understand how customers use your product, then create nudges and automation that help them unlock their full potential within their workflow or daily habits.

Product engagement score best practices

Your product engagement score should be easy to calculate, but easy doesn’t always mean foolproof. To ensure you’re measuring the right things and getting reliable insights, follow these best practices:

• Measure for separate user segments: A single PES across all users won’t tell the full story. New users, power users, and enterprise accounts will have vastly different engagement patterns. Breaking down PES by user segments helps you pinpoint areas where engagement is thriving – and where it’s struggling.
• Define your user activation trigger: Logging in isn’t the same as meaningful engagement. Set clear activation points based on users interacting with core features or reaching their “wow moment”. If they log in every day but don’t take action, they’re not really engaged.
• Track your own PES over time; don’t compare it to competitors: Your PES is unique to your product, customer base, and business model. Rather than benchmarking against competitors, focus on tracking trends over time to see how engagement evolves with new features, updates, or onboarding improvements.
• Adjust the weighting to match your priorities: Not all engagement actions are equal. Customize your PES formula by giving more weight to the actions that drive retention, growth, or expansion revenue. This makes your score more reflective of what success actually looks like for your product.

The all-in-one engagement score

Your product engagement score (PES) makes it easier to quickly understand how engaging your product is. A strong PES can reveal hidden expansion opportunities, uncover Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs), reduce churn, and highlight areas where your product experience needs work. 

But tracking it isn’t enough – you need to actually act on it. That means investing in onboarding, guiding users toward high-value features, leveraging self-service support, and continuously improving engagement strategies.

At the end of the day, a great PES isn’t about comparing yourself to others – it’s about tracking your own progress and making informed decisions to drive product success. 

When measured and used correctly, it helps you retain more users, increase revenue, and create a product that people love to use. Keep refining, keep improving, and let your PES be the guide to better engagement. 

The product engagement score is just one of many Product Management metrics you can track, designed to make your life easier. To make sure you’re tracking all the important metrics and KPIs, check out our complete list of Product Management KPIs to keep you focused on the metrics that matter.