Duolingo Metric Design — Map of Content

The metric a team is graded on is the only strategy document that gets read every week. This skill is about choosing that number well — how to weight it, where to set its bar, what counter-metric sits beside it, and what caveats must travel with it — so that moving the number means users actually got value.

Scope note: this is the dashboard your own team argues over. Scores you publish to users or outsiders — ratings, certifications, proficiency levels, trust scores — have to survive gaming by the people being scored and belong elsewhere.

This skill is a graph. Scan the descriptions, follow only the [[wikilinks]] you need.

Shaping the number itself

• [[references/put-the-weight-in-the-formula-not-the-memo]] — when some actions are worth more than others, encode the ratio as a coefficient; a stated priority changes nothing.
• [[references/threshold-percentage-not-aggregate-total]] — grade on the share of users clearing a meaningful bar, not the sum, so a power-user cohort cannot absorb the whole gain.
• [[references/pair-every-growth-metric-with-a-quality-proxy]] — a growth metric alone drifts toward whatever is cheapest to repeat; the counterweight has to be readable daily.

Deciding what is measurable at all

• [[references/refuse-to-measure-the-vague-goal]] — decline to score the unfalsifiable word in your positioning; decompose it into named sub-competencies and publish the weak one too.

Getting numbers to the people who can act on them