This week, I’ll be a bit more concise than usual. 🙂

Metrics need to be:

• Actionable: help drive activity or decisions, e.g. ratios “What will I do differently based on this information?”
• Forward looking: observable now yet indicative of what will happen, e.g. nr of prospects
• Representative: the number is tied to the actual thing they are meant to capture
• Easy to observe/gather: defined well enough an intern can go and check them
• Comparable over time: ideally they can be collected in real time/daily, and you can do cohort analysis with them to see how the change as you experiment
• Mutually agreed and checked regularly with team and decision makers
• Objective: not based on estimates which can be wrong or biased
• Tied to the customer and customer needs
• Tied to learning/improving continuously

Metrics can be tied to operations, learning or finances.

If learning-based or early stage, look at metrics on a per-customer basis. Once the exchange of value works for each customer, look at growth metrics.

Nuff said.