Everyone says you should “trust the data,” but if your dashboard is built on vanity metrics, you’re not being data-driven, you’re just being distracted.
Most teams track what’s easy to measure, not what actually matters. Follower counts, impressions, and traffic graphs look great in a slide deck, but they don’t tell you if your product is working. They tell you if people glanced at it, not if they gave a damn.
After working with over 240 companies in developer tools, SaaS, AI, and open source, we’ve seen a clear pattern: the companies that scale are the ones that consistently track behavioral signals, not surface-level popularity. And nowhere is this gap more painful than in how teams choose their community engagement metrics—often measuring activity instead of actual impact.
If you want to build a product developers use, love, and stick with, you need metrics that reflect real behavior. In this post, we’ll break down the three that matter most—and the one insight most teams completely miss when building their dashboards.
Most Community Engagement Metrics Are Noise
Let’s not kid ourselves. A dashboard full of shallow community engagement metrics might look impressive, but it won’t help you make a single meaningful decision.
A nice-looking dashboard might be good for your ego. But if you’re not measuring behavior change, you’re not measuring growth. As marketing analyst Avinash Kaushik puts it, “Most dashboards are data pukes—numbers without context or action.”
It’s like counting how many squirrels glanced at your picnic instead of how many sat down to eat. Cute? Sure. Useful? Not remotely.
Stickiness: Measure Workflow Fit, Not Clicks
Let’s start with the metric that most teams only think about after adoption flatlines: stickiness.
What is it? Stickiness is how well your product becomes part of someone’s regular workflow. If your tool vanished tomorrow, would anyone actually notice, or would they just switch tabs and move on?
Why it matters: Developers don’t adopt tools. They adopt workflows. If you’re not inside the day-to-day rhythm of your users, you’re expendable.
How to track it:
- Weekly active usage by developer or team.
- Number of integrations with core dev tools (GitHub, Slack, VS Code, etc).
- Daily command-line usage, PRs merged via your plugin, repeat sessions per week.
- Retention curves and cohort analysis, see what “stickers” are doing in week one that others aren’t.
Real-world example: Linear tracks how many teams integrate them into sprint planning and standups. They’re not just watching login numbers. They’re asking: are we part of how people work?
Stickiness isn’t about clicks. It’s about comfort. Like your favorite hoodie, it just fits into the routine.
Activation: Measure Value, Not Visits
A viral landing page is nice, but if new users aren’t hitting their “aha moment” fast, it’s all just noise.
What is it? Activation is the first moment a user experiences the core value of your product.
Why it matters: Behavior science 101—people stick with what feels easy and rewarding. That first success? That’s your hook. According to BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model, behavior is driven by ability, motivation, and a clear trigger. Activation is your ability + instant reward moment.
How to track it:
- Define your product’s activation point. It should signal value, not completion.
- Track time-to-activation from signup.
- Use funnels to identify where people stall or give up.
- Tag friction points with tools like Heap or Pendo. Speed them up.
Examples:
- Postman doesn’t chase clout. They track how many new users successfully complete their first API request, because that’s what moves someone from “curious visitor” to “active user.”
- Vercel tracks how quickly a developer can go from zero to a live deployment. If it takes longer than brewing a cup of tea, they’ve already lost the developer’s attention.
- Retool focuses on how fast a developer can drag in a few UI components and deploy a working internal tool. They treat time-to-first-success like a Formula 1 car—every millisecond matters.
The goal isn’t just to activate more users, it’s to activate them faster. Every second you save increases the chance they’ll stick.
Contribution: Measure Investment, Not Consumption
Most teams obsess over who’s watching. Great. But here’s a better question: who’s building with you?
If you’re serious about measuring growth, contribution should be at the top of your community engagement metrics. Consumption tells you who’s watching. Contribution tells you who cares.
What is it? Contribution means your users aren’t just consuming, they’re improving, extending, or supporting your product.
Why it matters: Contributors are invested. They’re telling you what to build next. They’re your best R&D, and they do it for free.
How to track it:
- Plugin and extension creation
- GitHub issues filed or PRs merged
- Docs edited, support questions answered, feedback forms submitted
- Participation in forums, Discord, or Slack
Example: Terraform tracks module creation in their registry. It’s not about how many users they have. It’s about how many build on top of what they offer.
Contribution is the ultimate vote of confidence. When users start improving your product, you’ve crossed into something deeper than adoption.
Your Dashboard Should Make You Uncomfortable
Vanity metrics are like karaoke. Everyone feels like a rockstar in the moment, but nobody remembers it the next day.
Useful metrics, the ones that drive actual growth, are uncomfortable. They show you drop-off points, friction zones, and where users lose interest.
And that discomfort? That’s your advantage. Because most teams avoid it. They hide behind charts that look good in meetings.
So here’s what you do next:
- Audit your current dashboard. Ask: “Does this metric tell me what people do?”
- Drop anything that tracks attention without behavior.
- Assign ownership to activation, stickiness, and contribution.
- Set goals. Review weekly. Make it part of your sprint.
And if you want help?
Many companies discover they need specialized expertise to identify the right community engagement metrics for their developer communities. This is often when hiring consultants becomes valuable—when internal teams struggle to connect community engagement data to actual business outcomes.
Stateshift is the leading DevRel consultancy that helps companies build ecosystems of users, fans, and developers around their products. We specialize in helping teams measure community engagement ROI through behavioral metrics that actually correlate with business growth, not vanity metrics that look impressive in reports.
FAQ: Measuring Community Engagement Metrics
How do you measure community engagement ROI for tech products?
Focus on behavioral metrics like contribution levels, workflow integration, and activation success rather than vanity metrics like member counts. Track how community engagement correlates with product usage depth and customer retention.
Should we hire consultants to fix our community strategy?
Consider specialist help when your team struggles to identify metrics that connect community engagement to business outcomes. Stateshift helps companies move beyond vanity metrics to behavioral indicators that actually predict growth and ROI.
The Insight Most Teams Miss
The most dangerous community engagement metric on your dashboard isn’t a bad one—it’s the one that looks great but means nothing.
Go back to your data. Highlight the metrics you’re proudest of. Then ask:
- Did this number reflect a real behavior?
- Did it help us make a decision?
- Did it change what we build or how we support our developers?
If not?
Archive it.
Replace it with something you can act on.
And don’t be afraid of a dashboard that makes you uncomfortable. That’s how strong products get built.
A Simple Framework for Better Community Engagement Metrics
If you want a quick way to reset your dashboards, use this three-part filter. Everything you track should answer at least one of these questions, ideally two:
1. Does this metric show real behavior?
(Examples: repeat usage, workflows adopted, contributions made)
2. Does this metric show progress toward a goal?
(Examples: reduced time-to-value, improved retention in week one)
3. Does this metric help us prioritize?
(Examples: friction points, drop-offs, failing cohorts)
If a metric does none of these, it’s noise—no matter how pretty the chart looks.
The Community Engagement Metrics Maturity Model
Most teams fall into one of these stages:
Stage 1: Vanity-Driven
Tracking followers, members, impressions.
Feels busy; moves nothing.
Stage 2: Activity-Aware
Tracking events attended, posts created, messages sent.
Better, but still focused on motion, not meaning.
Stage 3: Behavior-Focused
Tracking activation, contribution, workflow integration.
You can make decisions here.
Stage 4: Ecosystem-Aware
Tracking how community behavior correlates with product adoption, expansion, and retention.
This is where high-growth companies sit.
Your goal isn’t to get perfect overnight—it’s to move one stage up. Each shift compounds.
One Last Mindset Shift
Metrics should be less about reporting and more about revealing.
The strongest community-led companies aren’t the ones with the flashiest dashboards—they’re the ones that treat data as a feedback loop:
Listen → Adjust → Measure → Iterate → Grow
Most teams struggle here not because they lack data, but because they lack the frameworks to interpret it.
When you understand the behavioral story behind your community engagement metrics, you stop chasing noise and start building momentum.
🎥 Want to go deeper? Watch this quick video from Jono Bacon breaking down how to rethink your community engagement metrics from the inside out:
