Don’t Measure Everything

It’s counterintuitive, but when instrumenting your product, don’t try to measure everything from the start. You’ll quickly get overwhelmed. You’ll spend weeks debating what events to track, how to name your events, and who is responsible for what before you even get started. This is a waste of time. There is no way to know from the outset how you should set everything up. No matter how much planning you do, you’ll make mistakes. You’ll measure something that you thought meant one thing and discover later that it really meant something else. You’ll develop a naming schema only to later discover that you forgot about a key part of the product. You’ll find the perfect way to measure a key action only to learn months later that you had a bug that caused that event to trigger ten times more often than it should have. It happens to all of us. Trust that you’ll learn as you go.

Instead of trying to plan everything upfront, start small, and experiment your way to the best instrumentation.