The four types of metrics
Published in
3 min readMay 7, 2018
Building fit-for-purpose products and services
People love metrics! I love metrics! We all love metrics!
That is an old conversation in software delivery, and you can easily find heaps of content out there telling you which metrics [they believe] you should be using. The discussion today is about classifying the metrics (the metadata of the data).
The Fitness for Purpose Framework, unveiled by David Anderson and Alexei Zheglov in their recent book Fit For Purpose — How modern businesses find, satisfy & keep customers (which I highly recommend), classify metrics into four groups:
- Fitness criteria (KPIs) with thresholds → Indicate selection (by customers)
- Health indicators with a healthy range → Used to monitor capabilities or aspects of the business. Should be monitored because they may give you early warning of problems that will eventually manifest in a failure to be fit-for-purpose.
- Improvement drivers with a target → Used to motivate change and are generally linked causally to fitness criteria.
- Vanity metrics → Make us feel good, where more is always better.
Let’s explore them!
