What are the most important metrics to track when road mapping your startup product?

2 How to choose metrics

Not all metrics are created equal. Some are more relevant, actionable, and reliable than others. To choose the right metrics for your product, you need to consider your stage, your goals, and your audience. For example, if you are in the validation stage, you might want to focus on metrics that show product-market fit, such as user feedback, retention rate, and referral rate. If you are in the growth stage, you might want to focus on metrics that show scalability, such as acquisition cost, lifetime value, and churn rate. And if you are reporting to investors, you might want to focus on metrics that show traction, such as revenue, growth rate, and market share.

3 What metrics to track

When measuring your product, you don't need to track hundreds of metrics. Instead, you should focus on a few key metrics, often referred to as north star metrics or the one metric that matters. These metrics depend on your product type, business model, and industry, but some common examples are daily active users (DAU) or monthly active users (MAU) for products that rely on user engagement and network effects, revenue or gross margin for products that generate income from sales or subscriptions, customer satisfaction score (CSAT) or net promoter score (NPS) for products that aim to deliver high-quality service or experience, conversion rate or activation rate for products that require users to take a specific action or complete a task, and time to value or time on task for products that solve a problem or provide a benefit for users.

4 How to collect metrics

Once you have defined your key metrics, you need to collect and analyze them. Depending on your data sources, complexity, and budget, there are various methods and tools available for doing this. For instance, analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Amplitude can be used to track and visualize user behavior, events, and trends on your website or app. Additionally, surveys, interviews, or feedback forms can be employed to gather qualitative data and insights from your users or customers. Experiments such as A/B tests, multivariate tests, or split tests can help compare and optimize different versions of your product or features. Lastly, dashboards, reports, or scorecards can be used to monitor and communicate your metrics to your team, stakeholders, or investors.

5 How to use metrics

Using metrics to inform your road mapping process and improve your product requires setting SMART goals to track progress and performance. Then, you need to identify and prioritize key problems, opportunities, and hypotheses based on the metrics, followed by validating and iterating on the solutions or experiments. Finally, it's important to communicate and align the metrics, goals, and learnings with your team, stakeholders, and investors. Doing this will help you solicit feedback and support.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?