Your quarterly business review shows that revenue grew 3% instead of the targeted 15%. The room tenses. Executives ask what went wrong. But the data only tells you what happened, not why, and certainly not what to do about it. By the time revenue shows up in a report, the decisions that caused it were made months ago.
The metrics pyramid is a framework for organising your measurements so you can act on signals before they become outcomes. At the top sit lagging indicators — revenue, profit, customer satisfaction. At the bottom sit leading indicators — signups, activation rates, feature adoption. The leading indicators predict where the lagging indicators are headed, giving you time to intervene.
The Core Idea
The pyramid has three levels. At the top are outcome metrics — the lagging indicators that tell you what already happened. Revenue, profit, NPS, and customer satisfaction live here. These are the metrics executives care about, but by the time they change, the opportunity to influence them has passed.
In the middle are behavioural metrics — the indicators that show what is happening right now. Active users, retention rates, and engagement depth sit here. These metrics reflect current product health and often predict where outcome metrics are headed.