Make Your Metrics Intuitive

A great metric should be readily understood by employees, stakeholders and decision-makers – something that a junior engineer joining the team would understand on their first day and quickly grasp what it measures, why it matters, and how they can contribute to its improvement. As teams scale and organizations grow rapidly, this clarity becomes even more important. While “it can be hard to make it look easy,” investing the effort to distill complex observability data into a concise metric is crucial.

At Prime Video, we had massive streams of information from millions of devices. Without the right focus, the challenge of improving the streaming experience felt unbounded and overwhelming. By focusing on Time Spent Waiting, we were able to distill this data into something that was easily understood by both technical team members and executive leaders, and, importantly, could help guide action and measure progress across a 100+ person engineering team.

Focus on the Inputs

While output metrics – those that measure outcomes achieved, such as revenue, retention rate or gross margin – provide important insights into business health, they are often beyond our direct control. In contrast, input metrics allow us to measure the actions we take to achieve outcomes, and we can actively influence them. When a metric directly correlates with the efforts undertaken, it provides actionable insights. For instance, if an engineering team improves code quality (work done), they can expect to see a positive effect on system stability or customer satisfaction (the metric).

With the Time Spent Waiting metric, we were able to drill down on even more digestible inputs such as latency contributions (e.g., fetching images, rendering cover art, validating credentials and rendering controls) and work to pinpoint precisely where time was being lost. This approach helped guide the efforts of our engineering organization, allowing team members to focus on specific work to enhance the customer experience, ultimately driving positive changes in output metrics like app engagement, customer retention and overall revenue growth.

Measure Strategic Priorities

Connecting your team's metrics to broader organizational goals may seem obvious, yet it's surprising how often teams – engineering teams, in particular – operate only with available metrics simply because they can, rather than aligning with what truly matters to senior leadership and the overall strategy.

When metrics reflect strategic priorities, your team gains a clear understanding of and appreciation for their opportunity to impact the organization's success. Many of the most effective metrics I’ve worked with blend customer usage and tech measures, which was certainly the case with Time Spent Waiting.  This alignment can also foster meaningful cross-functional collaboration, allowing different departments to work toward shared goals while tailoring metrics to their specific functions.