Name your game before you name your metric

Every product plays one of three games

Before you can choose a metric you have to know what kind of product you are running. Every digital product plays one of three engagement games: attention, transactions, or productivity. The game you play determines what good engagement even looks like, and getting this wrong inverts your metric.

An attention product, a social feed or a media app, wins by maximising time spent. More minutes in the app is more value captured and more revenue, so for those products an engagement-time metric is a perfectly good star, which is why Spotify watches time spent listening and a media app watches session length. A transaction product wins on completed exchanges, the booking made or the order placed, which is why Airbnb steers by nights booked. A productivity product wins when the customer gets a job done, ideally fast.

Most lean B2B plays the productivity game

Here is the fact that should change how you read every metric you have ever envied: productivity is the predominant game in B2B software, and in the productivity game time spent can correlate negatively with value. The whole point of a B2B tool is usually to help someone finish faster. If your customers are spending more time in your product to achieve the same outcome, that is friction, not engagement. The number you would celebrate in an attention product is the number you should fear in a productivity one.

This is why a borrowed engagement-time metric is not merely imperfect for most B2B, it is actively wrong, pointing your effort in the opposite direction from value. The founder who imports session duration from a consumer app and tries to grow it is optimising for the customer struggling longer. It is also why HubSpot, a B2B productivity suite, settled on weekly active teams rather than minutes-in-app: the unit is a team getting a job done together, not time burned.

Name your game first, out loud

So the first move in choosing a north star is not to look at metrics at all. It is to name your game. Are you selling attention, transactions, or productivity? For most lean B2B operators the honest answer is productivity, and that answer immediately rules out a whole class of fashionable engagement metrics and points you toward measuring jobs done, outcomes reached, value received per account. Name the game, and the field of sensible metrics narrows before you have argued about a single number.