Growth Metrics
The quantitative measures that track how a product is performing, including user acquisition, engagement, retention, and the rate of growth over time.
Growth metrics are the numbers that tell you whether your product is working. They answer questions like: How many people are using your product? Are they coming back? Are they telling others about it? Are you growing faster this week than last week? Without metrics, you are flying blind. With them, you can make informed decisions about what to improve, what to double down on, and what to cut.
The specific metrics that matter depend on your product. For a mobile app, you might track daily active users, session length, and retention rate. For a service, you might measure the number of customers served, customer satisfaction scores, and referral rates. For any product, the most important growth metric is often the simplest one: are more people using this today than they were a week ago, and why? The why is just as important as the number because it tells you what is driving the growth and how to sustain it.
For high school students, learning to think in terms of metrics is a game-changer. It shifts you from hoping your project is working to knowing whether it is working. During Loona's Build program, every team tracks growth metrics for their product. By Demo Day, you present not just what you built but the real data behind it: how many users you reached, what feedback you received, and how the product improved over time. This evidence-based approach to building is exactly what colleges and future employers want to see.