Success will be measured by...

In a past life, I was a project manager at digital agencies. I was there when a lot of people were talking about agile and no one was ever really doing it. It could be argued that no one is really doing it properly now but that is not a fight I want to get into here.

What was being done, and I still see today, is a lot of “user stories”.

“As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].”

These are great, especially when really thought out. You are looking at things from a customer point of view, what needs to be achieved and for a reason so you are not necessarily dictating the solution but leaving it open to the developer/UX/expert to decide. But when it comes to analytics the best one I have seen is:

“As a business analyst I want to record data so that I can create reports.”

That’s the best, but 99% of the time it is usually “Add tracking code” as it’s own JIRA ticket with no information.

This often leads to not tracking what people actually care about, no measurement plan in place, and at the end the day we can’t really tell you if what we built was successful, I mean a lot of people clicked that new button but was the customer happy about it?

Why isn’t analytics put into every user story? If you know what you want achieve shouldn’t you state how you are going measure that it is achieved. I propose a new format:

“As a [persona],I [want to], [so that]. Success will be measured by [success metric].”

Just that extra line, “success will be measured by…” could potentially change the entire workflow. This means that you start the process knowing what needle you need to move, everyone has a clear goal in mind. As you don’t know what you are building yet (some of the time) the metric won’t be as specific as clicks on a button but hopefully, something that really matters to the business like increase registrations or reduced support centre calls. It also means the analyst know what they need to track to make sure we can report on it in the future and make sure you have a baseline metric before it goes live.

This also is vital for continuous improvement. How do you know if the feature you just built was any good if you didn’t know what success was supposed to look like? After a ticket is put in done, who is checking if it achieved its goal before moving onto the next thing? The team hosts retrospectives to see how the team can function better together but are you sharing the wins and loses of the actual output with the team - what achieved its goal - let’s celebrate that. What didn’t achieve its goal - can we review and make it better?

For now, it is just a dream but I will write my user story:

As a digital analyst,

I want user stories to include "success will be measured by..."

So that teams have a common goal to focus on, baseline metrics and movement in metrics can be easily reported and the team will know if they succeeded

Success will be measured by the number of teams adaptiving this new technique

So now I need to work out how I will track that. Comment below if you started doing it - that will help.