About the author

Jeff Chang (@JeffChang30) is a growth technical leader at Pinterest and angel investor. If your startup is looking for an angel investor who can help with all things growth, please send over an email!

Introduction

There’s a lot of articles about growing your userbase, but how about protecting your hard earned metrics? There are many events that can affect your growth numbers, such as accidental product changes, external service outages, Google search algorithm changes, and more. Growth monitoring is very important because it is just as easy to lose metrics as to gain them. In the early stages of a company, most of these events aren’t even noticed, but as you grow, you’ll want to understand all significant metrics changes in order to mitigate negative ones and take advantage of positive ones. Growth monitoring is tough because it’s not just a technical problem. Not only do you have to have to right tools, but your team also has to have the right education and processes for handling metrics anomalies. This blog post will talk about a holistic approach to building an awesome growth monitoring system.

Growth Monitoring Framework Stages

In every tech company, engineers usually keep a tight watch on the overall api success rate and other system metrics to maximize uptime. If the uptime drops even a little, engineers respond quickly to resolve the issue. At Pinterest, we view growth metrics the same way. However, growth metrics are harder in some ways to maintain than overall success metrics for several reasons:

Metrics fluctuate regularly throughout the day, week, and year so it can be hard to tell what’s wrong

There are a lot of different growth metrics to maintain

There are usually more external services that you rely on for growth that can affect your growth metrics

There are more internal changes that can affect growth metrics such as simple copy changes

When incidents happen, we have lots of tools to detect and resolve as quickly as possible. However, building a robust framework wasn’t easy and takes a long time.