after tracking about 30 growth metrics for a year i realized we only needed 5

So for the longest time I was obsessed with having dashboards for everything. Signups, activation rate, time to first value, weekly active users, expansion revenue, churn by cohort, NPS, feature adoption per segment. You name it, I had a chart for it.

The problem was nobody on the team actually looked at any of it. We'd have these weekly meetings where I'd pull up the dashboard and everyone would nod and then go back to doing whatever they were already doing. The data wasn't changing decisions. It was just making me feel productive.

About 3 months ago I stripped it all down. Kept only the ones where if the number moved, we'd actually do something different the next day. Ended up with roughly 5. Took me a while to admit that all those other metrics were just vanity dressed up as strategy.

The weird part is our growth actually got better after I stopped tracking most of it. I think we were drowning in noise and calling it insight. Less data, more focus, turns out thats the whole game.

Still not sure if I cut too deep though.