One question I get asked a lot by founders and product managers I meet is “Are my metrics good enough?” This might refer to good enough to raise money, or good enough to keep working on a feature or product, or good enough to believe the product will grow into something much bigger someday. People love to have benchmarks to compare their metrics to. But benchmarks are dangerous since they may tell very different stories for different products. There really isn’t an easy answer to compare all products against each other. There’s no clear threshold where it becomes clear something is working or not. The reality is it depends a lot on the actual product.



A couple of years ago, I posted on this topic: “The Only Metric That Matters.” Recently, I was invited to present this at the Mind The Product conference (#mtpcon) and I used the opportunity to refine my thinking. After giving the talk, I received a number of requests to post the slides. I’m happy to share them below.



In the deck below, I came back to the core question about metrics and knowing whether or not something is growing and working. It’s easy to get lost in vanity metrics and data points that other companies are using to sell their business. But, the only thing founders need to think about is: Are people using your product? Are they using it how you expect (i.e performing the core action)? And, are they performing the core action at the frequency you expect?



Please let me know if you have any feedback, and remember, focus on the only metric that matters.