A Leader's Guide to Metrics Reviews

Ada and I both had the privilege of working at two data-driven companies, LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey, led by two analytically rigorous leaders, Jeff Weiner, and the late Dave Goldberg. Those experiences shaped the way that we both now think about building an effective data-driven product culture. One practice that both companies established was weekly executive-level metrics reviews. LinkedIn had two such meetings: the first was a member value meeting focused on the consumer experience, and the second was a monetization meeting covering each of the company's business lines. SurveyMonkey, on the other hand, had a single meeting called ACER, which stood for acquisition, conversion, engagement, retention, where they covered these funnels across all A/B tests happening in the company. I've come to believe that establishing such a metrics review meeting is critical for developing an effective data-driven culture and I wanted to share some of the best practices around doing so.

Why metrics reviews matter

There are three primary benefits of establishing weekly metrics reviews:

I'm a firm believer that the best leaders don't simply delegate and get out of the way. Instead, they establish strong systems of accountability as well as systems of inspection. A strong system of inspection enables leaders to regularly monitor progress, share best practices and learnings, and establish a high quality bar. Weekly metrics reviews are a fantastic system of inspection that enable you to accomplish all of this. There are many real downsides when you don't have such a system in place. Ada was recently talking to an investor about one of his portfolio companies and he was retelling a story of how the marketing team at the company had decided to completely redesign the company's marketing site to give it a far more modern look and feel. Months later they noticed a meaningful decline in their revenue, but it took them another couple of weeks to realize that the marketing site's redesign was the culprit. Having a weekly metrics review in place helps ensure you'll never have to go that long before identifying and correcting such a mistake.

Another key benefit of establishing weekly metrics reviews is it enforces a culture of data-driven decision-making. Too often companies say they are data-driven but when I actually look inside to see how teams are operating, I hear anecdotes like the following:

• "I look at dashboards when I get a chance, but there is so much going on that I'm not looking at them regularly."

• "I can't trust the dashboards because we've had so many data quality issues in the past."

• "Whenever I look at the data, there are just so many random spikes and drops that I can't make any sense of it."

All of these are symptoms of not truly having a data-driven culture. A weekly metrics review solves for it by forcing key stakeholders to review the metrics each and every week and creating a forum to discuss the challenges they encounter.

The third benefit is that well-executed metrics reviews help to develop your team's collective product intuition. When you regularly review metrics, hear an analysis and explanation for each trend you discover, and internalize the results of A/B tests, you start to form opinions of what actually moves the needle vs not. Doing this regularly and seeings hundreds of such tests and trends is what ultimately builds your product intuition. This product intuition then helps you shortcut roadmap prioritization because you already have a feel for what types of initiatives will work for your business, helping you get way more leverage out of your existing team's resources.