Reference

Sources and further reading

Selected research, frameworks and practitioner material that informed the playbook’s approach to product measurement.

Measuring Products is an original practitioner synthesis rather than an implementation of one existing framework. The sources below influenced particular parts of the playbook or provide useful routes into deeper study.

This is a selected reading list, not a claim that every recommendation on the site comes directly from these sources. Where an article relies on a specific external claim, that source should also be linked from the article itself.

Product and user-experience measurement

HEART framework

Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu introduced HEART as a user-centred framework for connecting product goals with measures of happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success.

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications

North Star framework

Amplitude’s North Star material is a useful reference for connecting a measure of customer value with a set of input metrics and strategic hypotheses. Measuring Products adopts the useful distinction between outcomes and contributing signals, while treating causal relationships as hypotheses rather than facts.

The North Star Playbook

Experimentation and causal interpretation

Trustworthy online controlled experiments

Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang and Ya Xu provide a practical account of designing, operating and interpreting controlled experiments, including instrumentation quality, violated assumptions and common analytical traps.

Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing

Large-scale experimentation platforms

Microsoft Research’s description of its experimentation platform is a useful technical reference for the trustworthiness and scalability required when evidence is used to evaluate product changes.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Experimentation Platform

Event design and instrumentation

Tracking design

Snowplow’s tracking-design guidance shows how event specifications, reusable entities and tracking plans can combine business context with technical structure. The platform-specific implementation is not required to use this playbook, but the distinction between a durable event definition and an implementation plan is valuable.

Introduction to tracking design

Defining the data to collect with tracking plans

Privacy and data governance

Data minimisation

The Information Commissioner’s Office explains the UK GDPR principle that personal data should be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for the stated purpose. This supports the playbook’s recommendation to justify event properties rather than collecting context merely because it may be useful later.

ICO guidance on data minimisation

Storage limitation

The ICO’s storage-limitation guidance reinforces that retention periods should follow the purpose for which personal data is collected rather than defaulting to indefinite storage.

ICO guidance on storage limitation

How this list will develop

The public v1 keeps the reading list deliberately small. Future additions should meet at least one of these conditions:

  • the source supports an important claim made in an article;
  • it introduces a framework discussed or contrasted in the playbook;
  • it provides deeper technical or research guidance beyond the playbook’s scope;
  • it materially improves a reader’s ability to evaluate the recommendation.

Sources should be added because they help the reader, not to make the playbook appear more academic than it is.