Are you tracking the wrong metric?

You’re asked to track a metric. It sounds reasonable. It’s the kind of number leadership cares about. So you add it to the dashboard.

Six weeks later, your team has done good work. The metric hasn’t moved. Or it has moved - but for reasons nothing to do with you.

This is the trap of tracking the wrong thing.

The appeal

We reach for broad metrics because they’re what the business cares about. Revenue. Call time. Customer satisfaction scores.

These numbers matter - but they’re upstream, lagging metrics, influenced by factors your team doesn’t control.

The critique

Imagine you’re asked to track average call time. Your team owns one part of a ten-minute call. Even if your part gets faster, smoother, more reliable - the average barely moves. And if it does move, you can’t tell whether it was your work or something else entirely.

Volume metrics have the same problem. Knowing that 10,000 customers completed a journey last month tells you about demand. It tells you nothing about whether the journey was any good.

The real problem

The metric your stakeholders want to track and the metric that tells you whether your work is good are often completely different things.

Stakeholders want to track what they care about. That’s fair. But when that becomes the measure of your team’s success, you end up flying blind - doing excellent work that’s invisible to the data, or missing something important that the number is too blunt to catch.

The alternative

Before you agree to a metric, ask two questions:

1. What are we trying to learn?

2. What would we change as a result?

If you can’t answer both, the metric is decoration.

For UX work especially, qualitative signals are often better than quantitative ones. Not “did the number go down?” but “can users find what they need?” Not a dashboard - a feedback form, a targeted question to a handful of real users.

And before you track anything, establish a baseline. Not to prove success, but so you can see what normal looks like - and notice when something genuinely changes.

The metric you’re asked to track is sometimes the metric that matters to someone else. That doesn’t make it useless. But it does mean you need something closer to your work - something that can actually tell you whether the change you made was good.

Averages can come later. First, know what you’re actually measuring.

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