What you own, influence, and observe
Metrics decisions involve PMs, analysts, engineers, and leadership. These are the accountability lines. Own means you make the call, Influence means your input shapes it, Observe means you need visibility but it is not your decision.
Own
You make the decision
• Proposing and defending the North Star Metric to leadership
• Defining what counts as an active user before any tracking begins
• Setting the success metric for every feature before it is built
• Identifying counter-metrics alongside every primary metric
• Diagnosing a metric drop and presenting a root cause to stakeholders
• The Pivot or Stop call when a metric does not meet pre-defined criteria
Influence
Your input shapes the decision
• How events are instrumented and named in the analytics platform
• Which cohorts the data team segments in their analysis
• Dashboard layout and which metrics are surfaced to leadership
• A/B test design: hypothesis, sample size, and duration
• Which leading indicators are tracked alongside lagging business metrics
• Frequency and format of metric reviews with the team
Observe
Not your call, but you need visibility
• How the data pipeline is built and maintained
• Statistical significance calculations run by the data team
• Infrastructure monitoring and server-side performance metrics
• Financial metric definitions set by Finance and Accounting
• Specific SQL queries and data transformation logic