KPIs: what they are, how many to track, and which ones matter

A KPI is a number you check on a schedule and act on. That's the whole definition. A metric is any measurement your systems produce; a KPI is the handful you have decided to run the business by, each with an owner, a goal, and a place on the agenda every week.

The test is not whether a number is interesting. It's whether anything changes when the number moves. Website sessions are interesting. Sessions become a KPI the moment somebody owns them, has a weekly target, and is expected to explain a bad week and do something about it.

That's also why exports from your accounting system rarely make good KPIs on their own. They are accurate, they arrive late, and by the time you read them the week that produced them is gone.

Five to fifteen for a leadership team, checked weekly, one owner per row. Below five you can't see the business. Above fifteen the review becomes a reading exercise and the team stops arguing about any single number. Departments can keep their own longer lists; the leadership set is a summary rather than a merge of everything underneath.

The one-owner rule does more work than it looks. A row owned by two people is owned by nobody, and the week it goes red you get an explanation from each of them and a decision from neither.

If you can't get under fifteen, the usual cause is that several rows measure the same outcome at different stages. Keep the earliest one you can act on and let the rest live in a department view.

Forget the acronym. A number earns a place on the weekly list if it passes five tests: it is specific enough to argue about, someone can collect it in minutes, one person owns it, it has a goal written next to it, and it moves early enough that this week's effort shows up in it.

The fastest way to a first draft is to steal one. Each department below has a list of measurables that small companies actually run, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, with a starting goal you can adjust once you see two months of real numbers on the board.

This page is the overview. Each article below takes one question and answers it at length: what the letters mean, how KPIs sit beside OKRs, the test that separates a KPI from an ordinary metric, and five department guides that give you twelve fully defined rows apiece with owners, target sources and the way each one gets gamed.

Half the arguments in a KPI review are about vocabulary rather than about the business. One person says KPI and means any number in the report; another says target and means a direction. The six entries below settle the words that cause the most trouble, each in plain English with the way the term usually gets used badly.