Metrics: What is the behavior you want to change?
When thinking about success metrics, it ultimately boils down to a simple question: What are the user behaviors you hope to change?
In this article, I walk you through thinking about desired changes, desired behaviors, proxy metrics, common pitfalls and some examples of good metrics.
Desired Changes
This could also be seen as:
What are the behaviors you hope a user will begin to adopt?
Meditating daily
Sitting still once a week for 5 minutes
What is the desired final outcome?
Reduced stress
Reduced heart rate (as proxy for stress reduction)
Proxy Metrics
A proxy metric measures actions that are known to be pre-cursers for the desired action. For example, % of new user who message at least one person per session.
Percentage of (members/new customers/returning customers) who do at least (the minimum threshold for user action) by (X period in time).
Core Desired Behavior
We start with a goal but can only measure success if the user take a core action that moves the user to the end goal state. To measure product success, we need to determine what the core desired behavior is that:
moves them towards the end goal
is the actual end goal
is a proxy for the end goal
Avoid Pitfalls
Identify Key User Actions always, don’t say just Action
Churn is hard to move quick, don’t rely on it for case questions
you can mention but also add you know it is hard to move quickly
General statements with measures Non-Metrics (or bad metrics). For example:
People use the feature
30-day active users of Netflix will increase
Users watch at least half of the content they download
Users watch at least one movie offline or 2 episodes of a TV show
Good Samples
# of users commenting on at least 2 posts per visit
Time or % increase to monthly total viewing hours contributed by offline hours.
# or % of monthly active users watch at least Y hours of offline content per month.
# of new videos posted per creator per week
Resources:
The Google PM Analytical Interview —The Most Common Mistakes