Metrics We Will and Won’t Publish Publicly — Field Notes

Who this is for

Teams that write trade-offs down before coding burn fewer sprints when a stakeholder changes their mind mid-build. We keep ADRs short on purpose.

Decisions that still look smart in 18 months

Ignore the buzzwords. For Metrics We Will and Won’t Publish Publicly — Field Notes, the hard constraint is usually data ownership or ops capacity — not how many features fit on a roadmap slide.

Build checklist we actually use

Instrument the happy path and the ugly path. Silent failures are what turn a launch into a weekend incident.

Failure modes we keep seeing

Ship a thin vertical slice, measure, then widen. Big-bang rewrites rarely survive the first month of real traffic.

How we measure rollout

Use boring technology where the risk is operational. Save novelty for the one wedge that makes the product worth buying.

We update this when delivery patterns change on live client work.