Measure What Matters

In business, especially in SaaS, there’s a well-known term: vanity metrics. These are numbers that don’t actually tell you much about a business’s health or growth. Focusing on them diverts attention, hides what actually matters, and, worst of all, gives false confidence.

Every business is different. There are standard metrics everyone follows, like DAU, MAU, retention, and churn. When they go up and to the right, everyone’s happy. But they don’t apply equally to every business. For a seasonal business, churn is a natural part of the cycle; obsessing over that number helps no one.

Beyond the standard ones, there are metrics specific to a particular business, and to a specific time in its life. For an insurance product it might be the number of claims; for a podcasting service, minutes of audio recorded. It also depends on what the business is trying to do: a young product chasing customers and brand awareness might focus on user activity, while a mature one focuses on retention and expansion.

This is well established. In the same vein, I’ve noticed many of us chase vanity metrics in our personal lives too. With the proliferation of smart watches, bracelets, rings, and necklaces, people are tracking numbers more than ever. As someone who was enough of an aficionado to build an app for it, I’ve come to realise a lot of what I tracked was just vanity metrics.

Take sleep. A sleep-quality score might be a useful number, but it’s not as good a signal as how refreshed you feel when you wake up. If you feel good and energised, it doesn’t matter what the score says. Worse, the number can mislead you into thinking about how you’re supposed to feel about your sleep.

Or exercise. Thirty minutes a day is the widely recommended target, and that’s all I really need to be mindful of. It doesn’t matter what my average workout time over the past three months is, or which way it’s trending. Up, down, or flat, I’m not trying to move that number in either direction.

Over time, I noticed how much my actions were being dictated by the numbers. Hitting that 30-minute mark felt like a compulsion, even when a hard 29-minute one is perfectly fine. A sleep score of 80? Hmm, I must not have slept well, even though I feel good.

Now I only track the numbers I actually want to move over time: weight, body-fat percentage, investment growth. Once I made that decision, I realised I didn’t really need a fitness tracker at all.

This has helped me focus on the here and now, on just the activity at hand. And it lets my inner self guide what I do, instead of some outsourced, generic algorithm.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.