Stop tracking everything: Rethink your data strategy
If you’ve ever opened a product analytics dashboard and scrolled past dozens of unlabeled metrics, charts with no viewers, and events no one can explain—welcome to the world of metric sprawl.
In my roles at a MAANG company and a remittance fintech, I’ve seen product teams obsessed with instrumenting everything: every click, every scroll, every hover, every field. The thinking is, “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
But there’s a hidden cost to this mindset. And it’s time we talk about it.
The cost of over-instrumentation
Let’s be clear: tracking is essential. But too much tracking leads to real problems.
1. Slower product development
Engineers spend hours wiring up events that no one ends up using. At one point at the remittance fintech I worked at, a front-end team spent two sprints adding 20+ tracking events—only to find six of them were ever referenced. That’s wasted effort and lost momentum.
2. Harder debugging and QA
The more events you track, the harder it becomes to test and validate them. I’ve sat in launch reviews where 80% of the discussion was around whether an event was firing correctly—not whether the product worked.
3. Metric confusion
Multiple teams define the same action differently—“checkout_started,” “begin_checkout,” “initiate_purchase”—each slightly different, none universally trusted. It erodes confidence in the data.
4. Decision paralysis
The more data you have, the harder it becomes to interpret. Analysts waste time reconciling events instead of surfacing insights. And product managers spend more time asking what the data says than acting on what it says.
Track less. Align more.
At the MAANG company I worked at, I saw teams succeed when they treated instrumentation as a product, not just a task. That means asking:
- What decisions will this data support?
- Who is the end user of this metric?
- If we don’t track this, what risk are we actually taking?
Here’s a better way to approach instrumentation:
1. Start with the decision
Before you log an event, ask: What will we do differently if this metric goes up or down? If there’s no decision tied to the data, skip it.
2. Use metric “charters”
Create a simple 1-pager for key events: What does it mean? Who owns it? How is it calculated? What are the edge cases? This keeps metrics consistent and interpretable across teams.
3. Audit your events quarterly
Once a quarter, hold a “tracking cleanup” session. Review unused events. Sunset or consolidate duplicates. Reclaim clarity.
4. Involve analysts early
Bring your analysts into the design phase, not after the product ships. This prevents backfilling instrumentation and ensures the data you collect will be usable and trustworthy.
A real example: Lean tracking for a high-stakes launch
At the remittance fintech, we once launched a new product flow with just five core events:
- Entry point
- Step-by-step funnel progress
- Exit point
- Primary conversion
- Drop-off reason (where possible)
That was it. But because we knew these were the right events—and had cross-functional agreement—we could answer 90% of stakeholder questions within days of launch.
No confusion. No debugging. Just clarity.
The best part? Teams trusted the data because it was clean and focused. Adoption decisions, design tweaks, and comms changes were all made faster because we didn’t need to dig through a swamp of metrics to understand what happened.
Don’t just track—think
Tracking every user action might feel like progress. But without purpose, it’s just noise.
Ask yourself:
- Are we tracking this because it’s useful, or just because we can?
- Can we explain what this metric means without a 15-minute detour?
- Is our instrumentation helping us move faster, or slowing us down?
Sometimes, the most strategic data move isn’t adding another event. It’s deleting one.
Lenard Lim is an Analytics Lead with experience at MAANG and Wise, helping data and product teams use analytics to drive smarter decisions. His focus lies in bridging the gap between data and strategy with practical, actionable insights.
