Why The Developer Metrics You’re Tracking Are Lying to You

Part 2 of the Dev Engagement Series: Developer Metrics

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most metrics for DevRel focus on activity, not outcomes, which makes it harder to measure the success of DevRel teams when leadership asks real business questions.

Most developer relations and developer community leaders can answer how many views, signups, or members they added last month. Very few can explain what those numbers mean, and how it actually impacts the business.

That’s the real problem with vanity metrics. They’re easy to track, easy to present, but mostly useless for decision-making. And for companies building developer ecosystems, that gap becomes expensive very quickly.

Good metrics for DevRel signal whether developer engagement leads to product adoption, retention, and business growth, not just awareness or activity.

On paper, many DevRel programs look healthy. Content is shipping. Webinars are running. Community membership is growing. Dashboards fill with upward-trending charts.

But in reviews, the same questions come up:

• Are developers actually using the product?
• Is this driving adoption or just attention?
• What should we double down on, and what should we stop?

This is where many teams get stuck. They aren’t failing because they lack effort. They’re struggling because the metrics they’re tracking can’t answer the questions leadership is asking.

Why the Right Metrics Matter

You’ve got executive buy-in for developer relations or community. There’s an approved budget. There’s a team ready to execute.

Once things get moving, activity ramps up quickly. Webinars go live. Content starts shipping. Community membership grows. Dashboards begin filling with upward-trending charts.

On paper, it looks like progress.

But this is the illusion of progress. Activity is high, but clarity is low.

In reviews, the same questions come up:

• Are developers actually using the product?
• Is this driving adoption or just attention?
• What should we double down on, and what should we stop?

Then comes the uncomfortable realization. The metrics being tracked can’t actually answer these questions.

We see this constantly in Discovery Calls. Teams aren’t failing because they lack effort. They’re struggling because the metrics they track can’t explain what’s actually working or why.

When metrics don’t reflect real developer behavior, teams lose the ability to make confident decisions. Progress becomes harder to explain. Strategy starts drifting. And conversations with leadership turn reactive instead of intentional.

We have a collective obsession with data.

Instead of asking "What should we measure?", we should ask, "What questions don't I have answers for?", and pick the *minimum* set of metrics that help us to find answers to those questions.

Fewer metrics mean fewer distractions.

— Jono Bacon (@jonobacon) February 20, 2021

How Vanity Metrics Lead to Failure

Vanity metrics aren’t just a waste of time. They actively distort strategy.

When teams track metrics that don’t reflect real developer behavior, effort shifts toward activity instead of impact. More content. More events. More campaigns. All in service of numbers that look good in a dashboard but say very little about whether developers are actually getting value.

Over time, this creates noise.

Developers are busy and selective. When engagement is driven by surface-level activity rather than real usefulness, attention drops. Trust erodes. And once that trust is gone, it’s hard to earn back.

This isn’t unique to DevRel. It shows up across marketing and growth teams more broadly.

A 2022 survey by Gartner found that marketing dashboards influence only 53 percent of actual business decisions, and projected that many leaders would reduce their reliance on analytics because promised improvements never materialized. The data exists, but it doesn’t help teams decide what to do next.

In developer ecosystems, the cost is higher. Developers are especially sensitive to fluff. When engagement isn’t grounded in real value, credibility fades quickly. And trust is the foundation every healthy developer ecosystem depends on.

The result is familiar. Teams stay busy, but progress becomes harder to explain. When leadership asks what’s working or what should change, the data doesn’t provide a clear answer.

Vanity metrics answer the wrong question. They tell you that something happened, but never why it happened or what to do next.

Understanding Vanity Metrics

Most teams don’t start by asking, “What signal tells us the business is actually growing?”

They start where data is easiest to access.

Views.
Followers.
Signups.
Members.

These numbers feel safe. They’re visible. They trend up and to the right in dashboards. And most importantly, they rarely challenge assumptions.

We often use this example internally:

You can have 1,000 customers paying $1.
Or 10 customers paying $10,000.

If you only track customer count, both scenarios look like growth. But one of them hides a serious problem. Vanity metrics don’t reveal that difference.

The same pattern shows up in developer ecosystems.

A Slack community with 5,000 members means very little if no one is shipping your product. A blog with 50,000 views means nothing if no one progresses toward activation or adoption.

Vanity metrics answer the wrong question. They tell you that something happened, but they don’t explain why it happened or what should change next.

Because they lack context, they make it easy to confuse motion with momentum. Teams stay busy, dashboards look healthy, and yet the business struggles to understand what DevRel is actually contributing.

Why Tracking the Right Metrics Is Difficult

There’s a reason many teams hesitate to track better metrics.

Metrics come with baggage. When you measure the right things, they expose friction. They surface drop-offs. They force uncomfortable conversations about what isn’t working and why.

And beneath all of that is something more personal. The fear that poor metrics will reflect poorly on the team. That effort will be judged as wasted. That the work will feel harder to defend.

So teams avoid it.

But avoiding reality doesn’t make it disappear.

A useful parallel comes from the dot-com era. Many investors focused on exciting signals. Brand buzz. Rapid hiring. Flashy offices. Those metrics looked impressive in the moment, but they didn’t reflect durability.

Others focused on less exciting indicators. Cash flow. Unit economics. Long-term advantage. When the market corrected, those were the metrics that held up.

Developer ecosystems follow the same pattern.

It’s tempting to celebrate surface-level engagement. Big launches. Growing communities. Rising activity. Those signals feel good and are easy to share. But the ecosystems that last are built by teams willing to measure the full developer experience, even when the data is uncomfortable.

Tracking the right metrics doesn’t create problems. It reveals them while they’re still fixable.

And that visibility is what allows teams to adjust before small issues turn into structural ones.

The Stateshift Approach: Measure Signal, Not Activity

At Stateshift, we approach metrics for DevRel by working backward from business outcomes instead of starting with engagement volume.

Good metrics don’t just show that something happened. They explain whether developer activity is actually moving the business forward.

If you want to measure the success of DevRel teams, you have to stop optimizing for visibility and start tracking developer behavior that leads to adoption and retention.

That shift starts by separating activity metrics from signal metrics.

Vanity metrics vs. signal metrics

Here’s a simple way to see the difference:

Vanity metrics tell you that something happened.
Signal metrics tell you whether it mattered.

This distinction is critical. When teams rely on vanity metrics, they optimize for output. When they track signal metrics, they optimize for outcomes.

Step 1: Start with business growth

Before touching community or content metrics, define how DevRel success connects to the business.

Revenue is the clearest signal. But even in earlier stages, you can use strong proxies, such as:

• Revenue from developer-driven teams
• Retention of customers who completed a technical onboarding
• Expansion from accounts that actively engage with developer resources

If a metric can’t eventually connect to business growth, it’s supporting the wrong goal.

This alignment is exactly what we establish during our Blueprint Call with new clients. Teams agree on which outcomes actually define success before deciding what to measure.

Step 2: Measure onboarding effectiveness

Once you’ve aligned metrics to business outcomes, the next question is simple and uncomfortable:

Are developers actually able to use the product?

You can have strong awareness and steady growth, but if onboarding is unclear or slow, those gains never turn into real usage.

Weak onboarding metrics focus on volume:

• New signups
• Account creations
• Trial starts

These tell you interest exists. They don’t tell you whether developers succeeded.

Stronger onboarding metrics track behavior and time:

• Time to first successful integration
• Completion of key setup steps
• First meaningful output generated
• Weekly active users in the first 30 days

If developers struggle to get started, everything downstream suffers. Community engagement drops. Content performance flattens. Revenue lags.

When onboarding metrics are healthy, DevRel efforts compound. When they’re not, no amount of top-of-funnel activity fixes the problem.

Step 3: Measure engagement where it matters

Not all engagement is equal.

Good metrics for DevRel don’t measure how many people saw something. They measure whether developers found it useful enough to spend time with it and come back.

In content, views are a weak signal. Depth matters more.

Stronger content metrics include:

• Watch time
• Completion rate
• Repeat views
• Documentation dwell time

A real example from our work:
A YouTube channel with modest monthly views looked average on the surface. But when we looked closer, total watch time told a different story. Developers weren’t skimming. They were investing hours. That attention correlated directly with product usage.

For community metrics, the same principle applies.

Weak metrics:

• Total members
• New joins

Stronger metrics:

• Contributing members
• Meaningful interactions
• Peer-to-peer support
• Code contributions or shared solutions

Engagement metrics should help you explain why something changed, not just that it did.

Step 4: Review metrics through a repeatable system

Metrics only matter if they inform decisions.

At Stateshift, we use a simple loop we call the Acceleration Flywheel:

1. Review data
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Make a change
4. Observe what happens

A dip doesn’t automatically mean failure. It means something changed.

Maybe onboarding friction increased.
Maybe content topics drifted.
Maybe developer needs shifted.

The goal isn’t perfect numbers. The goal is understanding cause and effect.

When teams review metrics this way, decisions stop being reactive. Confidence improves. Strategy becomes easier to explain.

Step 5: Review weekly, not constantly

Metrics should guide action, not create anxiety.

Daily tracking introduces noise and overreaction. Monthly reviews are too slow to adjust.

A weekly cadence works best.

Each week, review:

• Business growth metrics
• Onboarding effectiveness
• Engagement quality

Then ask three questions:

• What changed?
• Why might it have changed?
• What’s the smallest experiment we can run next?

This keeps DevRel focused on progress, not performance theater.

What this gives you

When teams follow this sequence:

• Metrics stop being defensive
• Conversations with leadership get clearer
• Tradeoffs become easier to explain
• DevRel work connects directly to outcomes

That’s how metrics for DevRel stop being reports and start becoming tools.

Implementation guide: What to do this week

You don’t need a new dashboard or a full analytics overhaul to start using better metrics for DevRel. You just need to make a few deliberate choices.

Day 1: Pick three metrics

Choose one metric per layer:

• Business growth
• Onboarding effectiveness
• Engagement quality

This constraint matters. Tracking too many metrics recreates the same problem you’re trying to fix.

For example:

• Business growth: Revenue from developer-driven accounts
• Onboarding effectiveness: Weekly active users within the first 30 days
• Engagement quality: Content watch time or documentation dwell time

If a metric doesn’t change how you make decisions, replace it.

Day 2: Define what “good” looks like

Most teams react emotionally to charts because they never defined success in advance.

For each metric, answer two questions:

• What does healthy performance look like?
• What level of fluctuation is normal?

For example:

• Revenue: $7,000–$10,000 per month from accounts that completed onboarding
• Weekly active users: Maintain at least 500, with 10–20% variation
• Watch time: At least 300 hours per month

These ranges turn metrics into context instead of judgment.

Day 3: Set a weekly review rhythm

Metrics only matter if they’re reviewed consistently.

Once a week is enough.

In each review:

• Update the three metrics
• Compare results to the target ranges
• Note what moved up, down, or stayed flat
• Capture one observation worth exploring

For example:

• Active users increased, but revenue stayed flat
• Watch time dropped after changing content format
• Community activity rose after improving onboarding clarity

The goal isn’t to explain everything. It’s to notice patterns early.

Measurement and expected results

After your first few weekly cycles, ask the same three questions every time:

1. What changed?
2. Why might it have changed?
3. What’s the smallest experiment we can run next?

This is where metrics for DevRel start paying off.

Instead of reporting activity, you’re building a learning system. Over time, patterns emerge. You see which efforts compound and which ones stall. Decisions get easier to explain, especially to leadership.

Metrics stop being something you defend and start becoming something you use.

Turning metrics into momentum

Good metrics for DevRel don’t just prove you were busy. They prove your work is changing developer behavior in ways that lead to adoption, retention, and business growth.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: stop optimizing for what looks impressive, and start tracking what actually predicts outcomes.

This post is Part 2 of our Developer Engagement Series.
Part 3 is coming next, focused on product stickiness: how to tell whether developers are coming back, building habits, and integrating your product into real workflows.

Missed Part 1?
Part 1 covers developer voice and why clarity and trust matter more than volume when engaging developers. Be sure to check it out.

If you want practical help putting this into motion, subscribe to SHIFTsignal, our newsletter where we share real examples, patterns we see across teams, and what actually holds up in practice.

FAQ – Metrics for DevRel Teams