Tl;dr; One needs to define the priority of metrics of the same importance level.
Usually we have a few specific health metrics for each subsystem that are used separately. These metrics sometimes move in different directions. The first step in overcoming the chaos is to prioritize metrics of the same level through all subsystems. To do that you need to prioritize the subsystems themselves. For the communities that are in the content business, the priority of health metrics for the subsystem level usually are like follows (from highest to lowest):
- Content
- Community
- Software
At the first glance the order may seem controversial because in the long run the most important thing for any community project is the community itself, not the content. At the same time, in real life the first priority is to survive. If the project is closed because there is no money to pay for the servers, it does not matter whether the community was healthy or there was much to improve. Quality content attracts new members, keeps current members engaged, and generates revenue to pay the bills. The software plays an exclusively applied role for any community. All users want to have a platform with many useful tools that work quickly and stably, but simply because you have a good website no one will use it. People join and stay in a community because they are interested in either the topic (the content) or other users (the community).
If your project is in another type of business consider prioritizing metrics that measure things that generate money, influx of new users and anything else that makes the project sustainable. Then community. Everything else goes after these.
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.