If you only look at your bank account, you're driving using the rearview mirror. To steer the company, you need leading indicators that predict where you're heading.
Revenue tells you what happened last month. It doesn't tell you what will happen next month. Over the years, I've shifted my focus to a small set of metrics that act like an early warning system for the business.
Why Leading Indicators Beat Lagging Ones
Lagging metrics — revenue, profit, cash — are important, but they arrive too late to change. Leading metrics tell you whether the inputs that create revenue are healthy: customer behavior, team health, and product usage.
1. Customer Churn
This is the canary in the coal mine. If customers are leaving, something is broken in your product or service, no matter how good your sales numbers look. We obsess overwhy people leave.
- Track churn monthly and by segment (industry, plan, geography).
- Run exit interviews and tag the root cause: price, product, support, or strategy misfit.
- Turn common reasons into backlog items, not just notes in a CRM field.
2. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
Unhappy teams build bad products. You can't delight customers with a miserable workforce. We survey our team anonymously and regularly to measure engagement. If eNPS drops, we stop and fix the culture before it quietly kills the business.
- Send a short, regular survey: "How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?"
- Read every comment, not just the score, and reply with concrete actions.
- Share themes transparently so people see that feedback becomes change.
3. Feature Adoption Rate
Are people using what you build? If you ship a new feature and nobody uses it, you've wasted engineering resources. We measure adoption to validate our product roadmap. If a feature isn't being used, we either improve it, reposition it, or kill it.
- Define what "adopted" means (for example, used three times in two weeks).
- Set target adoption rates before building the feature.
- Run in-app nudges, tooltips, and onboarding flows to improve adoption.
4. Pipeline Quality, Not Just Quantity
Your sales pipeline can look huge and still be fake comfort if the leads are unqualified. We track how many opportunities advance from stage to stage and how quickly.
- Stage conversion: percentage of deals that move from demo to proposal, and proposal to close.
- Cycle time: average days from first contact to signed contract.
- Win reasons and loss reasons: recorded and reviewed monthly with sales and product together.
FAQ: Metrics That Matter for Founders
How many metrics should a founder track?
You don't need 50 dashboards. Start with 5–7 core metrics that you can review weekly and that directly connect to customer value and team health.
What if my metrics look bad?
That's actually good news: data is telling you the truth early. Use it to focus the team on one or two specific improvements instead of guessing in the dark.
The Bottom Line
Don't get distracted by vanity metrics like "Facebook Likes" or "Total Signups." Focus on the numbers that represent real value being exchanged: customers staying, teams thriving, and features that people actually use. Those are the metrics that matter — and they will tell you whether you're winning long before the P&L does.