Measure What Matters

There’s a trope that continues to track as sensical.

“Measure what matters.”

I was talking to someone the other day about a feature in a product and asked about reporting on it. There wasn’t any reporting against the feature yet. e.g. who used it and how it was used. The thing is, if it really was valuable, you’d want to track the results. Are you adding features without a thought about how to communicate the value the feature gives back out? If so, then the reality might be the feature is useless. If it were useful you’d want a feedback loop to understand how.

Adding something custom without a mechanism to report back it’s use tells me it’s busy work.

What do you think? Is this true? Have you ever found anything valuable for which you didn’t have a subsequent reporting mechanism?