Product · 3 min read
Product metrics
Always knowing how a product is performing, in usage and in revenue, and treating a number moving the wrong way as the start of a question, not the end of one.
A team that doesn't know how its product is doing is flying blind, and no amount of user empathy makes up for it. Keeping that picture clear, and shared, is one of the three things a product manager owns. This page is about what we watch and, more importantly, what we do when it moves.
Always know how it's doing
The baseline expectation is boring and non-negotiable: at any moment, the PM and the team can say how the product is performing. Both halves of that matter.
- Usage: are people actually using it, are they coming back, is the thing we shipped last month being adopted or ignored.
- Revenue: is it making money, growing, retaining, expanding. A product can look healthy on usage and still be quietly failing on the economics, or the reverse.
This isn't a dashboard you glance at once a quarter. It's a picture you hold well enough to notice when it changes.
When a number moves the wrong way
A metric dropping is not a conclusion. It's the beginning of an investigation.
The wrong response to a bad number is to report it. The right response is to form a hypothesis for where to dig, and go dig there.
When something moves against you, the PM's job is to turn it into a question the team can chase: what changed, who's affected, what's the most likely cause, and what's the cheapest way to find out if that guess is right. Then the team investigates, usually by talking to the users behind the number, because the number tells you that something happened and almost never why.
Watch trends, not just today
Beyond the current state, the PM keeps an eye on the shape of things over time: the trends worth riding, the areas of concern before they become fires, and the emerging openings that a single day's snapshot hides. A lot of the value of holding the metrics is pattern recognition, seeing the slow drift that nobody notices day to day.
Review the same way across products
We follow a consistent format when we review how a product is doing, so that performance is comparable across products and a review doesn't turn into everyone presenting their numbers in a way that flatters them. Same shape, same questions, product to product. That consistency is what lets us look across the whole company and tell where attention is actually needed, which feeds directly into deciding what to build.
Metrics serve decisions, not the other way around
One caution. Metrics are here to inform judgment, not replace it. A team that optimizes a number it can move while ignoring the user problem it was supposed to represent has gamed itself. The point of always knowing how the product is doing is to make better calls about what to build and what to fix, in service of making users happy. If a metric stops standing in for something real, we change the metric.