focus-goalsWhat’s your OMTM (One Metric That Matters)?

If you had one and only one metric to track this year, what would it be?

For your convenience, in this post we’ve aggregated key points from a variety of blogs discussing the OMTM principle. Feel free to get the meat of the matter here, or click through to get more details at the original posts.

Why it’s important to know your OMTM

  • To cut through the hundreds of nagging concerns, questions and uncertainties and provide an answer to whatever you’ve deemed the most important question
  • To make sure you set goals, which are how you will determine success
  • To bring focus to your efforts and your employees efforts
  • To promote experimentation by shortcutting feedback related to success and failure against the one metric

How to identify your OMTM

  • Fix where you are worst – If you already have a solid foundation in place, then skip to #2. But if your business is struggling in several areas and you’re trying to fix them all at the same time, then this is a good starting place for you. The idea here is that the areas in your business where you are weakest are often the areas where your time and attention will make the biggest impact on business results. In this post we outline a few common areas where online businesses fall short, and how to tell if these points should be focus areas for you.
  • Business type + stage of your company – Lean Analytics covers two key factors in identifying your OMTM. The first is the business you’re in; for example. The second is what state you’re at in the growth of your business; for example: validating your minimum viable product (MVP), developing new features, or validating your business model.

How do you make your One Metric matter?

  • Choose your One Metric (Overwhelmed with all there is to choose from? Consider focusing on a small, critical project to get used to using this principle.)
  • Ask your team members to write about how they’ll contribute to achieving this metric
  • Keep a SIMPLE spreadsheet, visible to your whole team, where you can track your position relative to your goal
  • Talk about it every day, assessing what works and what should be pursued more aggressively; what doesn’t work and what you should stop doing; and if you only had one day left to achieve this goal, what would you do to give it a last push?

So what’s your One Metric? We’d love to know!