Metrics Sense: Explaining a Metric on Your Resume

Question

You mention on your resume that you moved the number of user sessions by X%. Why did you choose to measure this metric? How did you calculate it? What were your specific contributions in moving this metric?

Background

Assuming you have some program management experience, it is very likely that your resume mentions (or should mention) that you moved some metric by some percentage or value. It could be revenue generated, dollars saved, time saved, users gained, or something else. Being able to dive deep into these statements is important to show how engaged and hands-on you were in the project. This question is also good practice for thinking through what makes good success metrics and what the various trade-offs and edge cases are involved when doing so.

Solution approach

We’ll breakdown our answer as follows:

• Provide context into the project that moved this metric and why we chose to measure user sessions.
• Explain how we measured the metric.
• Detail our specific contributions to the project.

This approach starts high-level, and then it goes into the necessary detail to demonstrate our contributions and domain expertise.

Sample answer

Overview

I’ll start by providing a summary of the project and why we chose user sessions as our metric. Then, I’ll discuss how we measured this metric and how we attributed the metric movement to our particular project. Lastly, I’ll talk about my particular contributions to the project.

Project summary

This project was a new end-user facing feature that would surface more relevant content to users designed specifically to increase user engagement (i.e. increased clicks or scrolls) within the app. Our target was to increase engagement from our current user base only and not to gain new users. We chose user sessions because this would most accurately capture the increase in engagement our feature was aiming for.