Your new feature doubled conversions. Great, but what did it cost you? Success metrics show you what’s working, not what’s quietly breaking. I use two scenarios based on Doodle and home24 to show how to pair success metrics with technical, business and user behaviour health metrics. That way your short-term wins don’t eat away at your product’s foundation.
Lagging indicators tell you what happened, but only once it’s too late to change anything. Leading indicators give you a signal while you can still act. Most people can define both terms; far fewer know how to find them. Here are the two methods I use: mapping the journey to find its turning points, and building driver trees.
AI can do the legwork. So what's left for Product Managers? One skill to sharpen, one to learn and one extra to pick. My take after Compass AI & Tech Summit.
AARRR assumes users move through a straight funnel. They don't. Learn how to map your product's real loops and dependencies. Using LinkedIn, Miro, Airbnb and my own work at Doodle, this article shows how to map your product's actual Success Engine and use it to spot bottlenecks, set priorities and connect product work to business impact.
Most metric checklists stop at design. This two-stage framework adds the practical test whether it is gameable, relevant, useful for real decisions, and more. Learn more about Design Quality and Practical Quality of a metric.
Metrics used to come from what your tools offered. AI let me build one that didn't exist: a way to measure reflection, not reactions, on an indie movie forum.