Are you struggling to measure the success of your product?

If you think you need help monitoring and measuring the success of your product. Then you are most likely struggling to create a meaningful dashboard for your Product. The sheer number of metrics that indicate the effectiveness and performance of your product, Metrics indicating the behavior and satisfaction of your customers will overwhelm you.

You will struggle to draw co-relations between the various metrics, you will also struggle to identify the frequency with which you need to monitor them as well. Finding a solution to this challenge is no easy job unless you have clarity on the metrics you want to monitor.

Below are some recommendations to help you sort the clutter and help you create a useful Dashboard to monitor your product and business.

Begin by identifying a metric that is deeply connected with your vision. This will be the Star metric you would want to see grow over the years. This should be a long-term metric which is should never decline. This metric is often called a North Star as it will help you course correct.

The next step would be to identify what is called a Driver metric, such metrics help you measure the actions and behaviors that influence your North Star. you also need to identify the time scale with respect to which you would want to see this metric on the dashboard.

Lastly for each of your driver metrics identify the guard rail metrics. As the name indicates these metrics will come with a threshold you do not want to cross. These thresholds can or will change with time, but you should always have the threshold defined and indicated on the graphs.

A good dashboard should not be crammed with all identified metrics into a single view. A good pattern will be to have a main Product dashboard that shows North Star and Driver metrics. And for every driver metrics have a secondary dashboard with its related guard rail metrics. This way you can control your focus and gain required insights in a context you are monitoring. Hope this post gives you sufficient direction to help you better manage your product.