Session recordings for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about session recordings assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to keep

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How we handle it

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

How to tell if yours is fine

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about session recordings before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ten recordings will teach you something surprising — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.