Chapter 10. Get Ready to Measure
You need not only the ability to visualize your customer lifecycle, but also the ability to measure it.
The Need for Actionable Metrics
Even though the terrain before product/market fit is riddled with qualitative learning, you still need actionable metrics to be able to visualize and measure your customer lifecycle.
The objective before product/market fit is not as much about optimizing for conversion and all about quickly identifying and troubleshooting hot spots in your customer lifecycle.
Up until now, you have made a number of product decisions based on what customers have told you. It’s time to start measuring what they do.
What Is an Actionable Metric?
An actionable metric is one that ties specific and repeatable actions to observed results.
The opposite of actionable metrics are vanity metrics (like web hits or the number of downloads), which only serve to document the current state of the product but offer no insight (by themselves) into how you got there or what to do next.
A warning flag that indicates you might have a vanity metric on your hands is when the numbers don’t go anywhere but up and to the right every month.
Put another way, things like web hits or downloads are elements of subfunnels that make up the larger macro metric that matters, such as acquisition and activation.
It’s not what you measure, but how.
Understanding the difference between a vanity metric and a macro metric is the first step. In order to make your metrics actionable, ...
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