Not "what do you track" but what changed your mind
There's a difference between a dashboard full of numbers and the one number that drove a decision. Most teams track a lot. Few can point to the one that actually changed what they did. That one is the signal. The rest is noise until it becomes the one.
We've been asking product people: what's one metric that made you stop, look at the number, and change what you did next? Not "what do you track?" That's a long list. We want the short list. The number that, when it moved, made you do something different. Ship a fix. Kill a feature. Double down on a flow. That's the metric that matters. That's the one we want to surface.
When you can name that number, you have clarity. When you can't, you have a dashboard. Dashboards are fine. Clarity is better.
What people actually say
Completion rate on a critical flow. Time from signup to first value. Where people abandon the paywall. Retention by cohort for a feature. The answers are always specific. Nobody says "engagement." Nobody says "we have a lot of metrics." They say "we looked at completion on the onboarding flow and it was terrible, so we fixed step 3." They say "we saw that people who hit the paywall but didn't convert were dropping at the payment form, so we simplified it."
Specificity is the pattern. The metric is tied to a place in the product or a moment in the journey. When it moves, you know where to look. When you ship a change, you know which number to watch. That connection is what makes a metric useful. Without it, you have a number. With it, you have a lever.
We're building AppFit to surface those signals. The one focus. The few metrics that support it. The weekly summary so you see the number. The product journal so when it moves you see the cause. The goal is to make the "one metric that changed what we did" visible every week, not buried in a report you run once a quarter.
Why that matters for product
When the metric is tied to a real decision and it moves, you have a clear next step. Double down. Fix the drop-off. Change the flow. No more "interesting, we'll look into it." No more tickets that sit in the backlog. The number moves, you see it, you act. That's the loop that actually changes how you build.
The alternative is the dashboard that nobody acts on. Twenty tiles. No owner. When something moves, someone might notice. They might mention it in a meeting. Someone might add "look into that" to their list. Nothing happens. The metric was visible but not actionable. Visibility without action is just decoration.
The one metric that changed your mind is the one that's already actionable. You looked. You saw. You did something. Our job is to make that metric easy to see every week, so the loop keeps turning.
What's yours?
We're building AppFit to surface those signals. If you have a metric that actually moved the needle for you, we'd love to hear it. The more we hear, the better we get at building a product that puts that number in front of the right person at the right time.
The promise is simple: one focus, one number (or a few), one weekly moment to look. When the number moves, the product journal shows why. No digging. No ticket. Just the signal that changes what you build next.
