Best for
- The meeting where three dashboards show three 'active users' numbers
- Metrics about to go into contracts, board decks or bonus plans
- Ending the weekly argument about what churn actually is
What you give it
- The metric's name and intent, and the places it is already computed (the disagreeing dashboards welcome)
What you get back
- The definition: every term pinned — population, event, window, filters, the edge cases each decided and reasoned
- The reconciliation: why the existing numbers disagree, term by term, and which decision resolves each gap
- The canonical form: the definition as documentation and as the reference query, with ownership and change rules
How it works
- Interrogates the intent first: what decision does this metric inform, and what behaviour should it reward? The definition serves the intent, and gaming-resistance gets designed in.
- Pins every term that moves the number: the population (who counts), the qualifying event (what counts), the window (when counts), the filters (who is excluded) — each an explicit decision with its reason.
- Settles the edge cases by name: returning deleted accounts, internal users, the leap from trial to paid mid-window, partial periods — the arguments are always here.
- Reconciles the circulating numbers term by term, because adoption needs the old numbers' owners to see exactly why theirs differed.
Example
You: Define 'monthly active users' — product says 48k, marketing says 61k, the investor deck says 55k.
Result: The autopsy of the disagreement: marketing counts opened-the-email as active (term: what is an activity — decided: product actions only), product counts distinct users per calendar month while the deck used rolling 30 days (term: the window — decided: calendar, for comparability), and nobody had decided the test-account and deleted-account rules (decided, documented). The canonical definition landed at 47.2k with every decision reasoned; all three surfaces now compute from the one reference query, and the next board meeting had one number.
Limits — please read
- Defining is deciding; where a term is genuinely a business choice, it frames the options and someone owns the call.
- A definition without an owner and change rules drifts back into dialects; the governance lines are part of the deliverable.
- Historical restatement (the chart that changes shape) is flagged as the communication task it is.