Give Your Metrics an Expiry Date

Summary

(I wrote this back in May and failed to hit publish for some reason — which I discovered when I wanted to point somebody else to it. So publishing now!)Today the expiry date for a dashboard metric came up. It’s a proxy trailing metric for Something We Care About. The details are unimportant.Tracking it for the last eighteen months has helped us spot some opportunities to improve.In the last six months exploring some of those opportunities has helped us improve month-on-month for the last six months.Which is delightful!But having an expiry date means we get to take a step back and reassess whether it’s still useful. While it’s still a half way decent proxy:we now have more of an idea what specific actions move Something We Care About — and can track those directlywhile the metric lets us know we are improving, it doesn’t give a lot of signal on the rate of improvementwe’ve not used the metric to make any decisions with over the last three monthsThe metric has turned from something valuable — something that helped us make decisions and drive action — to a little number that’s always saying “it’s good”.It’s now failing the three questions I use to assess dashboard metrics:Is it visible at the right time?Is it actionable?Is it used?So… time for that particular metric to be thanked for its service and retired!Would we have retired it if we didn’t have the nudge from an expiry date? Probably not.Looking at dashboards and metrics become a habit — that’s part of their value — and breaking habits is hard. Which can lead to a huge mess of unactionable and irrelevant pretty graphs — and a false sense of confidence that everything important is tracked and under control.Which is why setting up little nudges to check whether a metric is still effective is so useful.TL;DR: Set expiry dates for your metrics ;-)ttfn.