Why vanity metrics persist
They look good in board decks and launch announcements. "We hit a million MAU." "Downloads are up 40%." Nobody asks the follow-up: how many of those users came back? How many completed the thing that matters? Vanity metrics are easy to report and easy to celebrate. They're also easy to misinterpret.
They don't tell you if you're building something people rely on or something they ignore. A spike in signups might mean your campaign worked. It might also mean you bought a lot of one-time visitors who never come back. Without a metric that's tied to a real outcome, you don't know. And when the board asks "how's growth?" you give them the number that sounds good, not the one that tells the truth.
The trap is that vanity metrics feel like progress. They go up. That feels like winning. But going up doesn't mean you're winning if the number isn't connected to a decision. If the number can't tell you what to do next, it's decoration.
What "actionable" actually means
Tied to a decision. When the number moves, you have a clear next step: double down, fix the drop-off, or change the flow. If the number can go up or down and you still don't know what to do, it's not actionable.
Actionable metrics are usually boring. Completion rate on the onboarding flow. Time from signup to first value. Where people abandon the paywall. They're specific. They point to a place in the product or a moment in the journey. When they move, you know where to look. When they don't move after you shipped a change, you know the change didn't work. That feedback loop is what makes a metric useful.
The test is simple: if this number dropped 20% next week, would you know what to do? If yes, it's actionable. If you'd just be worried and start asking for more reports, it's not.
Examples that actually move product
Completion rate on a critical flow. Did the change you made to step 3 improve or hurt it? You can see. You can act. Time to first value. Are people getting to the "aha" moment faster after your onboarding update? The metric tells you. Where people abandon the paywall. If most of them drop at the payment form, you have a clear place to improve. If they drop before they even see the price, that's a different fix.
Retention by cohort for a feature. Did the users who saw the new flow retain better? That's a product question with a number attached. These metrics are boring to report in an all-hands. They're gold for decisions. They tell you what worked, what didn't, and where to look next.
The pattern is specificity. The more specific the metric, the more likely it's tied to something you can change. "Engagement" is vague. "Completed the core flow in the first session" is specific. One of them drives decisions. The other drives meetings.
Shifting the team's lens
Start by asking "what one number would change what we do next?" If that number went up, you'd double down. If it went down, you'd fix something. That's the metric to watch. Not the one that looks good in the deck. The one that changes behavior.
Then build the habit of watching it. Same day every week. Same owner. The team gets used to it. The number becomes part of the vocabulary. Decisions get tied to it. That's when you've shifted from vanity to action.
It's not that you stop tracking other things. It's that you stop letting the flashy number drive the narrative. The narrative should be driven by the number that drives you. Boring and specific beats impressive and useless every time.
