Constellation Metric's Three Categories

(Recommended pre-requisite) Below assumes you are familiar with constellation metrics, and want to dive in a little deeper on them.

Constellation Metrics are broken into three categories: Adoption, First-, and Second-order measures.

• Adoption: Did folks find the value, did the messaging resonate, is it in a place where they are experiencing a struggle moment, is the need as strong as we thought it’d be?
  • Open: Did they open the messaging (in-app, email, or some other medium)
  • Land: Did they execute on the call-to-action of the messaging?
  • Try: Once they’ve done the CTA, did they follow-thru and now are taking the actions needed for them to achieve the value?
    • Often times to achieve value you have to do things to “cast” before you “attain” the value. So, trying might look like casting value. An example is in an ATS the value attained is a hire-made. But you have to cast first… meaning you have to first post a job. That is value casted.
• First-order: Did the thing do its job?
  • Value: They’ve tried it… did it achieve our expected outcomes? What is the Keep-Improve-Sunset (KIS) threshold for this offering?
    • Continuing from the value casted example earlier, in the example of posting a job is “value casted”, making a hire is “value attained”.
  • Viability:Cost: Is it cost-effective to operationally support?
  • Viability:Benefit: Does it have an impact on one of the key, but lagging, indicators such as new-biz, expansion, and/or retention?
• Second-order: Did the thing it was supposed to do have an impact in an area that isn’t directly involved?
  • Performance of upstream dependent systems: For example, if you are building a reminder feature on a TODO list app… an upstream system is adding new TODOs. Does this reminder feature have any impact on the TODO creation?
  • Performance of downstream dependent systems: For example, does our reminder feature have any impact on TODO completion (assuming our first-order measure is acknowledgment of the reminder, which would make todo completion a downstream dependent system)?
  • Return value aka stickiness: Do folks come back to it? For example, do folks who set a reminder once, do it again?

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