How do you measure a launch?

There are three primary ways folks approach quantitative analysis of value delivered in software.

• Gut aka Not at all / Success Theater / “would we do this again” / “would I pay for this”
• North Star
• Constellation

Some stop celebrating when they have working software and/or use some measure of how a select few people “feel”. If you can get those that we are trying to please to answer “what do you think would make you cheer at the end of this?”… and they answer in some way other than “X feature exists”, listen closely, because that is the real hypothesis. But, if the culture is celebration of a feature being complete (which IS WORTH CELEBRATING), and we stop there… that is when you are purely in this category of “gut”.

Some identify a single measure. The North Star. Which is great in its simplicity and focus on the key value / the key hypothesis we have for this launch.

It is the most involved, but some use what I call “Constellation Metrics”.

Which is a collection of measures that are aimed at deliberately understanding the various aspects to the value we are trying to deliver. The point is to triangulate in on if we’ve accomplished what we set out to accomplish, acknowledging the fact that there are systems interacting with systems, and even though we can’t understand and instrument them all… to try and overly simplify sets us up for a false sense of security and doesn’t embrace a learning culture.

Note: Now that you see the options, I’d recommend checking out my personal favorite… spoiler alert, I like constellations 😉

Note: This was the ℹ[Min, Mid, Max] and ℹ[Why => What => Me] variant of the concept of launch effectiveness. If the other variants are created, I’ll update this with links to them.