Metrics & Outcomes — One Number Per Product

Build the metrics discipline: outcomes over outputs (Perri), the North Star with input metrics and counter-metrics, the One-Metric-That-Matters discipline, the honest version of OKRs at one-person scale, and — the solo-operator keystone — one number per product, with explicit keep and kill thresholds, instrumented, with the first measurement taken now. If you can't name the one number, you don't have a product; you have a project. The North Star is the SLO of product management; input metrics are the leading indicators that predict it before it breaks; counter-metrics are the regression checks that stop you from gaming it. OMTM is alert pruning: every metric without an attached decision erodes trust in the dashboard until decisions revert to intuition with the dashboard ignored — exactly how over-alerted on-call rotations die. The quarterly review is the retro: what did we expect, what happened, what's the gap, what changes. And the kill threshold is the circuit-breaker config: you set the trip condition while calm, precisely so you don't have to make the decision while emotionally invested in the requests still flowing.