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Release - January 17, 2022

· 3 min read
Belinda Bennett
Customer Success

✨ New ✨#

Metric Onboarding Flow#

Details

Product Component

Metric Ownership and Management

More Detail

  • Adding new types of rich metadata for metrics (display value formatting, increase is good/bad, and business owners).
  • Ability to lock metadata down in configs or leave editable in Transform UI.
  • New metric modal experience in the Transform UI.

What’s changing?

There is a problem today where some metadata fields like description and owner fields can be edited both in the config as well as in the UI, and this creates potential mismatch between what appears in the config and the UI. Because we cannot sync things back to config files, and because some organizations will actually want to lock down metadata under version control, we needed a solution that could ensure no collisions.

To accomplish this aim, we are improving metric config files so that they have a clearly delineated locked-metadata section, which is optional to fill in through the config. If any specific locked-metadata field is authored in the config, then that field becomes locked in the UI and is no longer editable in the UI — but all other fields remain editable in the UI. The config will be the “source of truth” for any metadata fields.

  • We are also making entirely new types of metric metadata fields to help customers create more rich context and understanding metrics they build. New fields include: Business Owner, Display Number Type Format, Metric Increase Good or Bad. In the future, we’ll continue adding more metadata fields so that the context around metrics becomes richer.
  • The metric owner field in the config will continue being called “Owner” and in the UI we will refer to the metric config owner as the “Technical Owner”. This change will help us with adding a new “Business Owner” field that differentiates folks who may have built the technical ETL pipeline to create the metric, from the business people or business analysts who understand the context about why a metric value may have changed. Technical owner is not editable in the UI (since it is set in the config as we described above).
  • We will do away with the separation of config authored description and UI authored description, just having one description in the future that can be set as locked-metadata in the config or authored in the UI. We have a preference for companies authoring descriptions in the UI because we have found that the metric descriptions authored in config files are generally of poor quality and do not take advantage of our markdown editing abilities.

Our intention, and what we believe is the best user experience, is that people choose to edit almost all their metadata in the UI and only choose to lock down metadata in config files when needed for specific business reasons.