Instrument from the first commit

The most expensive number in any engagement is the one you didn't capture at the start. You can always add analytics later. You can never go back and measure what the funnel did before you changed it.

What 'instrumented' means to us

• Analytics and Search Console are wired in the first week, not after launch.
• The key events — signup, activation, purchase, the one action that predicts retention — are defined before the feature that produces them is built.
• There's one dashboard across product, spend and search from day one, so every discipline argues from the same numbers.
• Revenue snapshots and health metrics are jobs in the codebase, not a spreadsheet someone updates.

On the platform work we've done, this goes as far as building the reporting into the product — Search Console sync, revenue snapshots and org-health snapshots run as cron jobs, so the state of the business is a query, not a compilation exercise.

The baseline is the deliverable

Before we change anything, we write down what it currently does. That snapshot is what we're accountable against. It's also the only honest way to claim a result later.