Matt Meeker, co-founder of Meetup and now with Polaris running Dogpatch NYC, gave a Skillshare class tonight on metrics. He stressed the need to combine and balance quantitative data, qualitative sources and entrepreneurial gut/judgement.
My favorite tidbit came when he was discussing how to prioritize your top metrics. His advice for picking your “driving metric”, as he called it, was (to paraphrase):
Think about how your customer defines and would measure success using your application, and track that.
Then think about the building blocks that drive that metric, and measure those too.
I think this is great advice for when you are lost in the weeds or awash in data. Return to the customer.