Give Your Metrics an Expiry Date

Overview The author shares a recent experience of retiring a dashboard metric after assigning it an expiry date. By reviewing the metric against a short questionnaire, the team recognized that the metric no longer drove decisions and was retired in favor of more actionable signals.

Key Takeaways

• Set explicit expiry dates for metrics so they are periodically reassessed.
• Use a three-question checklist (visibility, actionability, usage) to evaluate metric health.
• Retire metrics that no longer provide actionable insight and replace them with more direct indicators.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers looking to keep dashboards lean.
• Technical leaders who need data-driven decision making.
• Product owners and data analysts responsible for metric stewardship.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Three-question metric assessment (Is it visible at the right time? Is it actionable? Is it used?)