Metrics

Everyone wants to be "data-driven." But most teams are driven by the data that's easy to collect, not the data that actually answers their questions. Convenient data and useful data are rarely the same thing.

Open rate has been the headline email metric for two decades. It was never very reliable, and privacy changes have made it nearly meaningless. If you're optimizing for opens, you're optimizing a number that doesn't measure what you think.

Followers, page views, and impressions feel like progress. Often they're a comforting distraction from the numbers that actually predict whether you'll survive.