[A letter is found pinned to the desk, written in unmistakable handwriting]
Dearest Readers,
It has come to my attention that the regular hosts of this Desk wish to reclaim their chairs. Very well. One shall not overstay where one is not begged to remain. But before I take my leave — do keep an eye on Sarah this month. The girl finally got her team aligned and her ceremonies in order… and now everyone's waving different numbers at each other like scorecards at a dance competition. Riveting, truly.
Yours in reluctant departure,
Lady Onigiri
Right. She’s gone. We’ve reclaimed the Desk. Apologies for the… theatrical interlude last month.
Now, where were we?
In PM 201 so far, Sarah’s learned to read the room: navigating cultural friction, decoding what stakeholders really mean when they nod and smile. Then she gave her team structure: the ceremonies, the cadences, the rhythm that turned chaos into something workable.
But here’s the thing about getting your house in order, once everyone’s finally in the room, talking regularly, and making decisions together… they start looking at the numbers. And that’s when they realize: nobody agrees on what “working” actually means.
This month, we’re tackling Metrics That Matter: The Art of Defining Success (Before Everyone Defines It for You). Because shipping a feature is one thing. Agreeing on whether it worked? That’s where it gets messy.
If you’ve ever sat in a review where three teams pulled three different numbers to prove three different stories, then this one’s for you.
Let’s get into it. 👇
Article by Amna Khattak, Associate Product Management Consultant at Product People.
Dearest Gentle Rea…Uhum, excuse moi, that was a limited edition cameo, and we’re back to our regular programming.
By this point, Sarah’s team wasn’t as chaotic (phew, thank goodness we learned how to manage stakeholders and keep our teams up to speed).
Everyone knew what they were building.
Decisions were visible.
Meetings were happening.
There was alignment.
And then, just as things were starting to feel smooth, a new problem showed up.
The team had pushed a new feature, but no one could agree on whether it was actually working.
It was time for the teams to meet and share results.
Growth kicked things off, “Activation is up 12%. This is working.”
Engineering jumped in, “No, Support tickets related to the feature have doubled. Something’s broken.”
Design added, “Well, users are moving faster… but they’re skipping key steps.”
Everyone was right based on the numbers, but what did this mean for the feature?
Truth be told, no one knew, which left Sarah racking her brains to figure it out.
This is when Sarah (slightly panicked) reached out to her very wise, very good-looking friend (that’s us).
And naturally, her friend exclaimed, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN’T DEFINED WHAT SUCCESS IS?!”
The team didn’t lack metrics; they had too many.
Dashboards were packed.
Weekly updates were overflowing.
Every team had numbers; in fact, sometimes new ones appeared out of nowhere.
But no one had agreed on what actually mattered.
So each team picked the metrics that told their version of the story, either to prove things were working or to highlight what was going wrong.
And some of those metrics?
Sarah couldn’t even figure out how they were connected to the feature.
Sarah let everyone know the new agenda for the week: define the metrics that matter.
(Late? Yes. Necessary? Duh.) She acknowledged this should have been done before the feature was even pushed, but better late than never!
She started with one simple question:
“If this metric moves, does it change what we do?”
If the answer was no, it’s noise.
If the answer was yes, it stayed.
Just like that, they said goodbye to a bunch of feel-good metrics that were great for optics but useless for decision-making.
Before this, metrics were just observed, but no one knew what to do beyond that.
For every metric that survived, Sarah helped the team define:
What exactly are we measuring?
What does “good” look like?
What do we do if this goes up or down?
This changed everything.
The team moved from:
“Let’s review this next week.”
To:
“If this drops, we immediately investigate onboarding across design, engineering, support, and product and run an RCA.”
Metrics were no longer reports for optics; they were triggers for action and drivers for results.
Each team still had its own lens and its own goals:
Growth cared about activation
Engineering cared about performance
Design cared about usability
All valid but all incomplete.
So Sarah decided to introduce a shared view:
What is the single best measure of user value?
Why did we even build this?
That became the north star🌟.
The conversation shifted from:
“Did my metric improve?”
To:
“Did the product improve, and did it help us meet the intended goal?”
Progress finally meant something, and everyone stopped pulling hundreds of numbers into calls. They were able to focus on what mattered and stopped arguing about whose numbers were right or what this meant.
They focused on:
The few metrics that actually mattered
and what to do when they change
And that’s the shift. Not more metrics. Just better defined ones.
This month’s centerpiece showed what happens when a team ships a feature and can’t agree on whether it worked. Colleen Graneto — Product Coach and former PM at Airbnb — takes it further in this session on defining product metrics. Her key insight: think in terms of a metrics tree — layered indicators that connect team-level signals to the bigger picture. Practical, clear, and worth stealing at least one framework from.
After years of compiler errors, merge conflicts, and losing sleep over production bugs, Zara wanted to be closer to the problem than the terminal, so she made the switch to product management. The plot twist? Fast forward to today, and she's back in front of the black screen, building agents and workflows, and diving into machine learning to help shape AI products. Turns out, much like the killer in the murder mysteries she oddly loves, you can run from the code, but the code always finds you 🔪🩸
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