What are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity Metrics (which we’ll refer to as VMs from here on out) refer to measurable stats that don’t provide useful insights in helping you craft sound business decisions and strategies. They exist solely to conflate raw data with progress, when in fact, VMs are there only to inflate one’s sense of achievement/s (hence, ‘Vanity’).

These run in contrast to Actionable Metrics.

For example, tracking ‘monthly downloads’ on a video game product with a free subscription tier does not paint a cohesive picture if the game runs on a subscription payment model, and there are no indicators that multiplayer is a significant factor.

We can boast 80k monthly downloads and equate this with good business decisions. However, that doesn’t mean much if there are only 1000 paying subscribers.

Instead, more actionable metrics to track would be:

• Uninstall rate
• Upgrade rate
• Total Time Spent Playing

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Are Vanity Metrics really all that bad?

Yes… but it’s a lot more nuanced than that.

Ultimately, all data is collected because they are indicators of performance. To say that one type of data will always be a Vanity Metric is incorrect. Sometimes tracking monthly downloads is quite an important piece of information.

Data will always be beneficial to measure. In a perfect world, PMs will collect ALL data available, analyze, then make a decision.

The problem is that real-life circumstances plague organizations all the time. Not all companies have systems and resources in place to capture everything that goes into data entry points. Not to mention, there are times when a business decision has to be made because of its time-sensitivity element.

That means that  product managers with will have to focus on collecting data that has the highest chances of making an impact.

Applying the Pareto Rule, 20% of data can depict 80% of what you need to know. And if you already have 80%, then you can already make a well-informed decision. Waiting for the rest is Analysis Paralysis.

Your job as a Product Manager is to make these trade-off decisions.

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Recapping our Vanity Metrics Learnings

In Product Management, numbers and data play a pivotal role in shaping strategies and influencing decisions.

While Vanity Metrics, with their often impressive figures, can provide a boost to the collective morale, it's imperative to understand their limitations. They may not always be inherently bad, but their uncritical acceptance can lead to misguided strategies. On the other hand, Actionable Metrics provide a clearer pathway to understanding user behavior and predicting future trends.

As Product Managers, our challenge is to sift through the avalanche of data, discerning what truly matters. This journey is not just about celebrating big numbers, but about embracing a holistic understanding of data, prioritizing metrics that truly reflect our product's health, and consistently aligning our strategies with genuine insights.

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If you want to shift to tech, especially from a non-tech background, you need to either have good domain knowledge, lots of transferrable skills, or have something to bridge the skillset you have currently and the requirements of the roles that you are looking for.

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