Vibes are not enough. Your business wins or loses on numerical facts: are people doing the things you hope with your product?

The sooner you and your team build a rigorous foundation for answering this question, the better you get to sleep at night.

You’d be shocked how many enormous companies substitute socks, stickers and random “community” events for actual analysis.

Defeating the dinosaurs is so straightforward, it’s almost unfair.

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Analytics: just do it

Integrate a tool that provides you product analytics. I have a soft spot for PostHog: the hedgehog is cute and the product is extremely well documented.

But gathering a pile of events and numbers is not enough.

You need to decide what numbers correspond to success. So read up on, at minimum, creating North Star and Activation metrics. These will let you know if you’re moving in the direction you want, and if your product is becoming essential to developers.

When building a new product, you will always have questions about what people are doing and how much impact you are creating. Do not accept mystery. You deserve clarity, and you can get it through a rigorous approach to analytics.

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What you get for measurement

With a clear approach to measuring behavior, you can form hypotheses and test them with experiments. You can roll out new features and judge whether they’re worth the trouble.

If you can’t measure, you’ve got no choice but to throw random stuff at the wall and see what sticks. This gets costly and expensive, and runway is finite.

A note about introducing analytics

Analytics can feel gross if your community doesn’t know they’re being measured. Instead, communicate your goals clearly and proactively. You’ll find most developers will understand, and perhaps not even care.

Book an intro call

We can talk through what your developers are actually up to, then figure out the metrics you need to track their progress. Reach out to learn more about a one-day intensive to that leaves you with a clear approach to measurement.