Don’t Feed Your Vanity

One of the reasons measuring the “true progress” of a product is hard is because we prefer reporting good news over bad. We like charts that trend up and to the right, which isn’t all that bad by itself, until we start devising charts that can go nowhere but up and to the right.

Cumulative counts, like the total number of sign-ups since you launched, are the perfect example. These numbers can flatline but they can never go down. That’s the first tell-tale sign that you have a vanity metric on your hands.

In the interest of fairness, there is a place for vanity metrics. It is often used with great effect on marketing websites to build up social proof and ward off competition. You run into problems though when these same metrics are also used as internal measures of progress.