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Measurement & Guardrails Worksheet

Use when you need to answer: "What metric proves the outcome occurred, and what must not get worse while it does?"

Define how the team will know whether the outcome actually happened, and what damage is unacceptable even if it does.

Core Question

  1. What metric proves the outcome occurred, and what must not get worse while it does?

What to Document

  1. Outcome, adoption, engagement, efficiency, and quality metrics

  2. One Primary Outcome Metric

  3. Guardrail metrics: complaints, safety, cost, error rate, privacy, exclusion, support burden

  4. For each metric: baseline, target, data source, review period, owner

Common Mistake to Avoid

  1. Measuring only activity (logins, downloads, releases shipped) instead of the customer change the product was built to create.

Illustrative Example

  1. Primary outcome metric: percentage of important follow-up actions completed within 24 hours. Guardrail: incorrect AI suggestions must stay below an acceptable threshold.

Output of this stage

The Primary Outcome Metric is customer-facing, not just operationalGuardrails are defined before launch, not discovered after an incidentEvery metric has a data source and an owner
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