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 definitely 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...