Data-Driven Decision Making

Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics

Written by Carrie Brill

We’ve all been in that meeting. The slide goes up on the screen, the graph shows a line shooting up and to the right, and the room breaks into applause. "10,000 downloads in week one!" The stakeholders are high-fiving. The sales team is already calculating commissions. But you? You’re sitting there with a knot in your stomach because you know the truth: of those 10,000 downloads, only 500 people opened the app a second time. That is the danger of vanity metrics. They make us feel safe, successful, and smart. But if they aren't helping you make a decision, they aren't data - they’re just decoration.

The Comfort of "Big Numbers"

Vanity metrics are the comfort food of product management. Things like Total Registered Users, Page Views, or Social Followers are easy to track and generally always go up. They feed the ego.
The problem is that they are passive. They tell you that something happened, but they don’t tell you if it mattered.

  • Total Downloads doesn’t tell you if anyone is actually using the product.
  • Page Views doesn’t tell you if anyone found what they were looking for.
  • Follower Counts doesn’t tell you if anyone is buying.

If you are optimizing for these numbers, you’re building a product for optics, not for outcomes.

Bridging the communication gap between engineers and stakeholders

The Scary Stuff: Actionable Metrics

Transitioning to actionable metrics is hard because, frankly, the numbers usually aren't as pretty. Actionable metrics reveal the cracks in the foundation. They force you to look at behavior, not just volume.
These are the metrics that lie beneath the surface and actually change what you put on your roadmap:

  • Retention Rate: Instead of "How many people came in the door?", ask "How many stayed?"
  • Activation: Did the user actually experience value, or did they just sign up and vanish?
  • Churn: Who is leaving, and exactly when are they doing it?

An actionable metric passes the "So What?" test. If you see the number go down, you know exactly what you need to fix. If a vanity metric goes down, you just feel bad.

Making the Shift (Without Getting Fired)

Your job as a product manager (and as a translator between the business and the product )is to gently guide stakeholders away from the "feel-good" numbers and toward the "real" numbers.
It requires intention. You have to be the one to say, "Yes, traffic is up, but our conversion rate has dropped." You have to explain that chasing downloads without fixing retention is just filling a leaky bucket.

You need to shift focus if:

  • You can’t explain why a spike in traffic happened.
  • Your user base is growing, but revenue/engagement is flat.
  • You’re making roadmap decisions based on "what will look good in the Q3 review" rather than what solves a user problem.
Avoiding common communication pitfalls in product management

Final Thoughts

Data isn't there to validate your ego; it's there to challenge your assumptions. Moving beyond vanity metrics means accepting hard truths about your product. It’s less comfortable, sure. But it’s the only way to build something that actually lasts.

Are you measuring growth, or just noise? It’s easy to get distracted by big numbers that don't impact the bottom line. If you need help identifying the metrics that actually matter (and setting up the infrastructure to track them) we can help you build a data strategy that drives real decisions.
Let’s Get Actionable