Metrics are all the rage not just in tech companies, but every single company, everyone's social media accounts, their fitness trackers as well as their personal lives.

Every single day, we look at tens of metrics that help us make decisions.

So, what makes a metric good?

The purpose of a metric is to tell us something about what we are measuring. It could be about the health of our product, our progress towards a goal, etc.

In that sense, a really good metric is one that is very accurate in telling us what we are expecting it to tell us.

And a metric is very accurate when it has low false positives as well as low false negatives. If we are using a metric to indicate the health of our product, then the health of the product should be good when the metric says it is and it should not be good when it says it isn't.

Otherwise, we end up taking the wrong actions.

Thus, a good metric is one that minimizes false positives as well as false negatives.