Analytics and Metrics: Understanding Data for Growth
Theme of this edition: Analytics and Metrics: Understanding Data for Growth. Welcome to a friendly, pragmatic space where numbers become narratives, and insights become momentum. Stay curious, ask questions, and subscribe for weekly deep dives that turn data into compounding growth.
Why Metrics Matter for Real Growth
Finding Your North Star Metric
A true North Star Metric captures the value your users actually receive. One marketplace ditched gross merchandise volume for “weekly successful matches” and finally saw retention lift. What single metric, if improved, would reliably pull the rest of your business forward? Share your candidate below.
Leading vs Lagging Indicators
Revenue is a lagging signal; activation rate, time-to-value, and trial-to-paid are leading indicators that predict tomorrow’s outcomes. Teams that track both avoid reactive whiplash and build proactive habits. Which leading indicators would have warned you sooner about last quarter’s surprise?
Designing a Practical Measurement Framework
From Mission to KPIs via OKRs
Start with a crisp objective tied to customer value. Attach two or three outcome KPIs, not ten. Use input metrics to show how you’ll move them. Keep goals ambitious yet believable. Post your OKR draft in your team channel and ask three people to challenge the assumptions.
Metric Trees and Accountability
Map your North Star to drivers, sub-drivers, and actions in a metric tree. Assign an owner to each branch, clarify levers, and set guardrails. When everyone knows their slice of the tree, decisions speed up. Share a snapshot of your metric tree and tag owners for feedback.
Rituals: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly
Weekly reviews tackle input metrics and experiments; monthly reviews evaluate outcomes; quarterly reviews reset strategy. Keep meetings short, visual, and comparative to last period and plan. End with one clear decision. Want our concise agenda template? Comment “agenda” and we’ll send it.
Data Quality and Instrumentation You Can Trust
Define a naming convention, required properties, and ownership for each event. Document user and account identifiers, session rules, and versioning. Add a deprecation policy to avoid bloat. Before shipping, run a sandbox replay to validate edge cases. Need a taxonomy checklist? Tell us your stack.
Data Quality and Instrumentation You Can Trust
Unify definitions in one canonical dashboard. Lock key tiles, show calculation notes, and include last-updated timestamps. Use the same dashboard in exec reviews and standups to prevent metric drift. Pin it, share it, and archive duplicates. What’s your current “true north” dashboard link?
Data Quality and Instrumentation You Can Trust
Pageviews, raw signups, and impressions can lull teams into false confidence. Favor metrics that capture efficiency and depth: activation completion, retention by cohort, LTV/CAC, payback period. Add a red label to any chart that lacks a clear decision or owner. Retire it within a week.
Funnel Analytics: From Acquisition to Expansion
Segment acquisition by channel, intent, and cohort. Compare cost, quality, and downstream retention. A team we coached cut spend on low-intent ads and reinvested in partner referrals, boosting LTV/CAC within a month. Which channel shows strong second-order effects in your data?
Storytelling With Data That Inspires Action
Open with the user problem, show the evidence, and propose a focused action. Use plain language, not metric soup. End with tradeoffs and a clear owner. Share a slide draft in your team space and ask, “What’s unclear in 30 seconds?” Then revise mercilessly.
Storytelling With Data That Inspires Action
Pick charts that fit the question: retention curves for cohorts, histograms for distributions, sparklines for trends. Label directly, minimize clutter, and highlight the decision zone. Before presenting, print your slide and mark the single insight in pen. If it’s hard, simplify.