Chỉ theo đuổi một chỉ số là quá đơn giản

Khái niệm:: Đơn giản
Nguồn:: Don’t measure your product using a north star metric
Mâu thuẫn với:: Sự đơn giản ép ta phải làm nó cực kỳ tốt

Phân tích quyết định đa tiêu chí (MCDA) là phương pháp để tìm điểm đánh đổi tối ưu nhất
Hiểu biết không chỉ để mình làm một cái gì đó, mà còn để mình không làm một cái gì đó
Con người sẽ theo đuổi kỹ năng mới với giá trị tiềm năng trong phạm vi dự đoán

Stop treating “north star metrics” like the end-all be-all metric and accept the fact that there is no one metric that summarizes your entire product. Products and users are complex and can’t be summed up by a single “north star” metric.

What would happen if tomorrow, Apple or Facebook decided to stop reporting anything in their quarterly earnings report except one number? Well, aside from potential SEC lawsuits, the stock price would tumble because nobody would have a clue how they were growing!

In the same way, your products growth is not a linear function that goes up and to the right. Understanding your product’s growth is like reading a story, not a graph. What you can do, however, is come up with a list of “guidance metrics” that are informative and actionable.

Let’s help John with this.

  1. Create a list of core user actions – what are the three main actions users can do when using your product? For John, this list is:
    1. Viewing a new episode.
    2. Subscribing to a new podcast.
    3. Uploading a new episode for a user’s own podcast.
  2. Find a good metric to measure how many users you have. Say Weekly Active Users (WAU), where “active” is defined by someone opening his app for at least 5 seconds.
  3. Now, put (1) and (2) together! John’s guidance metrics are:
    1. Episodes Viewed/WAU
    2. Subscribes/WAU
    3. Uploads/WAU.

How to come up with guidance metrics

Now, John can either create a growth model using these metrics to forecast his product’s growth, create dashboards of these metrics over time so everybody can understand how the product is growing in realtime, measure the success of new features based on what user behavior they should drive – the possibilities are endless!

By using the three steps outlined above to come up with guidance metrics, you can ensure you’re constantly measuring your products growth without being overly focused on one north star metric.