Lean Analytics
If you track everything, you learn nothing — one metric, one stage, one decision at a time.
- Authors
- Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz
- Published
- 2013, O'Reilly
- Core tool
- One Metric That Matters (OMTM)
- Scope
- 6 business models × 5 stages
Forms & parts of speech
What the book says
Lean Analytics supplies the measurement half the lean movement kept hand-waving: at any moment a startup should obsess over ONE metric that matters, chosen by business model and stage. The book maps six models (e-commerce, SaaS, mobile app, media, UGC, marketplace) against five stages (empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, scale) — each cell with its right metric and real benchmarks. A good metric is comparative, understandable, a ratio or rate, and BEHAVIOR-CHANGING — if knowing it wouldn't change what you do, stop tracking it.
The ideas people quote
The OMTM as organizational focus, not dashboard minimalism; 'don't sell to the data — let the data sell to you'; vanity versus actionable redrawn as a test (what will you DO differently?); the stage gates — stickiness before virality before revenue, because growth poured into a leaky product is rented; and the draw-the-line discipline — set the target number BEFORE the experiment.
How to read it now
It remains the best answer to dashboard sprawl — most teams' 40-widget analytics pages fail its behavior-changing test on sight. The benchmarks aged (2013 app economics are history) but the selection logic is timeless and maps cleanly onto modern North Star practice: the OMTM is the North Star metric with a stage discipline attached. Read it when your team can't answer 'what number are we trying to move this quarter?' in one sentence.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Origin & history
Written for O'Reilly's Lean Series (Eric Ries, series editor) by Croll (Coradiant co-founder, Year One Labs) and Yoskovitz (Standout Jobs co-founder, later VarageSale and Highline Beta) — the accelerator's portfolio supplied the stage-by-stage evidence. Published March 2013.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- Who wrote Lean Analytics?
- Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz, published 2013 in O'Reilly's Lean Series with Eric Ries as series editor.
- What is the One Metric That Matters?
- The single metric your whole team obsesses over right now — chosen by business model and growth stage.
- What makes a good metric?
- Comparative, understandable, a ratio or rate, and behavior-changing — if it wouldn't change your actions, drop it.
Related tools & calculators
Resources & people to follow
- bookLean Analytics — Croll & Yoskovitz (the subject)
- bookThe Lean Startup — Ries (the parent)
- referenceLeanAnalyticsBook.com
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where lean analytics is a core concern: