“Many business outcomes, however, are lagging indicators. They measure something after it has happened. It’s hard for lagging indicators to guide a team’s work because it puts them in react mode, rather than empowers them to proactively drive results. For Sonja’s team, 90-day retention was a lagging indicator of customer satisfaction with the service. By the time the team was able to measure the impact of their product changes, customers had already churned. Therefore, we want to identify leading indicators that predict the direction of the lagging indicator. Sonja’s team believed that increasing the perceived value of tailor-made dog food and increasing the number of dogs who liked the food were leading indicators of customer retention. Assigning a team a leading indicator is always better than assigning a lagging indicator.”