How to avoid duplicating health metrics for people at different levels of an organization?
People at different levels in the company need metrics with different levels of detail. Directors and department heads are usually interested in the overall health of the project and its major subsystems. Product managers, developers, and community managers usually need lower level metrics related to the specific initiatives they are working on at the moment.
One of the best ways to achieve this without duplicating or overloading the number of metrics is to represent the metrics as a hierarchy, where higher-level metrics include data from all lower levels and the lower-level each metric measures one specific element of the system. We can cover the most needed metrics at the following four levels:
- Health metrics of the entire project.
- Health metrics for each independent subsystem (content, community, software, etc).
- Success metrics for ongoing initiatives.
- Health indicators.
At the highest level, metrics show how the whole system works in general. Going down through the hierarchy of metrics allows us to observe specific phenomena and measure their effectiveness in isolation.
Depending on the size of the company you work for and your colleagues’ needs, you can have all four levels or only one.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.