Health Metric
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What is Health Metric?
A Health Metric is a metric that measures the overall well-being or status of a critical area. Unlike Key Results (which target specific changes), health metrics are designed to ensure that nothing breaks or degrades while you're pursuing ambitious goals.
Examples of health metrics include: "System uptime (maintain >99.9%)," "Customer satisfaction score (maintain >7.0)," "Employee retention rate (maintain >90%)," "Code quality metrics (maintain test coverage >80%)." These are things you want to keep stable or improve slowly over time, not dramatic changes.
Health metrics serve as guardrails in OKR systems. While you're aggressively pursuing ambitious OKRs in some areas, health metrics ensure you're not inadvertently damaging other critical areas. For example, you might have an aggressive OKR to "Launch 10 new features in Q3" (outcome metric), but a health metric to "Maintain system uptime above 99.5%" (guardrail). If you're building so fast that uptime drops to 97%, you need to adjust your pace.
Also known as: Guardrail metric, Maintenance metric, Stability metric
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