Smart Metrics Strategy
Learn how to establish counter metrics and avoid gameable metrics.
We'll cover the following...
Establishing counter metrics
Metrics-based product development is one of the best things to happen in the software age. Metrics let us define what success looks like and then track our progress until we’ve definitively reached our goals.
Metrics for product development come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and each one has a different purpose. It is natural to pay the greatest amount of attention to the metrics that show how successful a product is. We use these success metrics or goal metrics to decide which features and improvements to add to our products first. They are quantitative measures of what we think success looks like, based on data. This makes it easy to measure success. They are the main way we know we are going in the right direction, and they are essential in measuring our operational efficiency.
For a given product, we might have a lot of metrics that show how well it’s doing, or we might decide to focus on a single North Star metric for the most clarity and focus all of our efforts on that.
But overemphasizing one or two success metrics can have unintended effects on a business. This is where counter metrics step in, to ensure that we are not blindsided by a focus on a handful of success metrics.
Counter metrics, also called guardrail metrics or health metrics, are measurements of parts of a product or business that may change if we focus on our success metrics. They are an important part of defining our success metrics because they help us see what’s going on and stop things from going horribly wrong.
So, for every success metric, we should have one (or more) counter metrics that serve as a constant reality check. Luckily for us, figuring out our counter metrics is as easy as thinking creatively about what might happen if we focus on our success metrics.
In a developer portal experience, we can create a success metric for the number of accounts created. This metric, although important to track, can be gamed if we start incentivizing users to sign up with different email addresses, in ...