Pick one metric on your team’s dashboard. What decision would change if it moved?
Ant Murphy offers two questions for finding out:
Two of my favourite questions to ask about any product metric are:
What are you trying to learn?
What change will you make as a result?
There are thousands of things you can measure, but measuring for measurement’s sake isn’t helpful. It needs to drive decisions.
The second question puts a team on the hook before the data arrives. It forces the decision rule into the open, when there’s less temptation to rationalize whatever the chart happens to show.
Murphy also argues that difficulty assembling a metric can be evidence that the team has stopped settling for whatever its analytics tool already exposes:
And that’s the trap that Ridgway was describing all those years ago and it’s still relevant today.
So I see friction as a good sign - it means the metric is:
- Unique: specific to your product and your problem, not pulled off the analytics shelf
- Meaningful: tied to the behaviour change you actually care about
- And thought through: you’ve actually unpacked what you’re trying to learn
So it’s worth pushing through the friction. I’ll take a meaningful proxy, or a smaller sample of something high-quality, over a generic metric every time.
