Escape the Vanity Metric Trap

Balanced scorecard pillars

There’s a saying I heard a lot over my career, and now often use when coaching product leaders:“What gets measured gets managed — and what gets measured poorly gets misunderstood.”

Too many product teams are still measuring the wrong things. They celebrate output instead of outcomes, activity instead of impact. Dashboards are full of numbers, but few tell a meaningful story about customer or business value.

And it’s not because leaders don’t care about impact. It’s because, in most organizations, measuring what truly matters is hard.

The Problem with Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are seductive. They make us feel good because they move easily and look impressive in presentations.

Metrics like:

• Page views

• Sign-ups

• Feature usage counts

• “Tickets closed” or “stories delivered”

They all create the illusion of progress.

But when you ask, “Did this make life better for the customer?” or “Did it drive business results?”, the answer is often fuzzy.

Vanity metrics measure motion, not momentum.

They tell you something is happening — but not whether it matters.

Why Product Leaders Struggle with Meaningful Measurement

From my coaching work with product executives, three root causes show up again and again:

1. Unclear Strategy

   If your company’s product strategy isn’t clearly articulated, it’s nearly impossible to define success metrics that ladder up to it.

   
   

2. Over-Reliance on Data Availability

   Teams measure what’s easy to track, not what’s important to understand. The absence of perfect data becomes an excuse for shallow measurement.

   
   

3. Pressure to Show Immediate Progress

   Stakeholders want visible movement. So leaders focus on short-term activity that can be quantified quickly, even if it doesn’t indicate long-term value.

How to Shift from Vanity to Value

The good news: moving toward meaningful measurement doesn’t require a massive analytics overhaul. It starts with asking better questions.

1. Start with Outcomes, Not Outputs

Every metric should answer: “What change are we trying to create?”

For example:

• Instead of “number of users onboarded,” measure “time to first value.”

• Instead of “number of experiments run,” measure “percentage of experiments that informed product direction.”

• Instead of “number of releases,” measure “customer satisfaction or retention following releases.”

When teams anchor metrics to behavioral or business change, they focus on impact, not activity.

2. Use a Balanced Scorecard for Product

A useful structure for product leaders is a four-lens view of success:

• Customer Value: Are customers achieving their desired outcomes? (e.g., NPS, task completion, retention)

• Business Value: Are we driving revenue, profit, or cost reduction?

• Team Health: Are we building sustainably? (e.g., engagement, delivery flow, burnout rates)

• Future Readiness: Are we learning fast enough to adapt? (e.g., validated discoveries, innovation pipeline)

When you balance these perspectives, you avoid over-optimizing for one at the expense of the others.

3. Tell a Story with Your Metrics

Numbers don’t speak for themselves, you have to translate them into narrative.

For example:

“Retention dropped 5% this quarter, but user feedback shows it’s due to onboarding friction. We’ve identified three areas to fix, which should recover those users and strengthen long-term engagement.”

That’s not reporting; that’s leadership.

Measuring What Matters Is a Leadership Act

Anyone can report metrics.

But great product leaders create meaning from measurement.

• They choose metrics that reflect strategy.

• They tell stories that connect numbers to value.

• And they build cultures where success is defined not by how much the team delivers — but by how much the customer and business benefit.

When you measure what truly matters, you don’t just guide your team — you elevate the entire organization’s understanding of what “success” really looks like.