Metrics: What is our one metric that matters?

[Cleop]

As a PO
I want to understand how people are engaging with my app
So that I can determine if their needs are being met

Questions that may help us to determine metrics:

• What are the critical success factors for the project?
• Who are the users of Time? (Who is the audience for time? #192)

[nelsonic]

@Cleop thank you for opening this issue to capture our OMTM for the Time App. 🎉

Users "dwylers"

users "dwylers" are "people who want to proactively track their time/progress on important tasks so that they can (a) stay focussed on their highest priority, (b) see where their time is being spent and (c) never be "stuck" for what work on next."
That is a fairly broad definition and I go into why in this comment: #192 (comment)
We will need to create personas for a few "target" people but the first person should be someone you know who has trouble with time/task/priority management (or generically a "Creative Technologist" similar to you, who is less time-effective and needs to track their time both at work and while training for {competitive-sporting-event} to discover why there are never enough hours in the day...).

We need to list the target person's:

• Name: e.g: "Thomas Timepoor"
• Age: 31
• Background: "amusing but realistic bio here..." [please add when you open "Personas" Issue]
• Goals: track time on tasks to achieve ambitious goals while maintaining work-life balance"
• Pain Points: "regularly over-runs on work/task estimates, never has enough time to exercise and gets distracted by shiny objects ... want's to cure all of these by using a systematic tool"
• Why?: Feels

Note: none of these points are reflective of Cleo who is consistently good at estimates and finds time to exercise, etc. These are generic points for our "target person".

Metrics

The One Metric That Matters (OMTM) for Time is simply: Average Time Tracked Per Active Person.
(feel free to come up with an acronym ... ATTPAP doesn't exactly role of the tongue ...)

We will give the person the stats for the time they have tracked on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
These Average Time Tracked (ATT) will be our internal "product owner" and team metrics.
The upside of this metric is that it is perfectly aligned for both people using the app and developers.
The downside is that the more people join the higher the denominator in the mean calculation.
i.e. the more successful we are, the harder we have to work to keep people engaged/using the app.
But ... rather than trying to consume and monetise people's "attention", when people are using our app they are moving their lives forward by focussing on their most important priority and working towards a clear goal/objective.

So, the more activities/time someone tracks the more insight they will have into their own personal effectiveness and thus the more "time wise" we will make them.

Please LMK if that answers your question. ❓
If so, please move on to creating the Persona Issue and link back to here. 🔗
Thanks! ✨

[Cleop]

Yep, thanks @nelsonic, you answered my question and more! 🎉

So it's super easily at our disposal I'm just going to reiterate the key metric here:

The One Metric That Matters (OMTM) for Time is simply: Average Time Tracked Per Active Person.

[Cleop]

Closing as this question has now been answered.

[nelsonic]

@Cleop closing the issue without capturing the answer in the Readme or "FAQ" means others
will not see the answer and will be "confused" as to the Metric we are optimising for.

You don't need to create the Pull Request making the answer "findable" for others,
but closing the issue means my efforts answering the question are wasted. 😞