Launch & operations
What to observe in your first release
Follow the core customer journey and measure the outcome you built for.
Follow one customer journey
Start with the one useful thing the product should let a customer do. Observe whether they reach it and where they need help. Page views and registrations can explain parts of the journey, but neither proves the intended task was completed.
Use a small set of event names and a written definition for each. Avoid putting private form contents or credentials into analytics.
Separate service health from customer value
Check that requests succeed, failures are handled, and data persists. Then ask whether the customer got the intended result. A healthy server cannot establish that the product is useful.
For a paid flow, verify payment confirmation and the resulting access or order together. The browser’s return page is not evidence of a completed payment.
Make the next decision explicit
Review the observations and choose a small next change. Note the reason and what you expect to learn. When the sample is small, describe the observations without treating them as a guaranteed conversion rate.
Keep collection proportional to the decision. More dashboards and continuous logs are not a substitute for reviewing a real user journey.