Can the analytics sometimes make you believe you’re making progress?

I was evaluating the metrics on some product recently, and I realized we had a dashboard flooded with different activities: pageviews, clicks, sign-ups, and feature use.

However, there was one thing we didn’t consider:

Did people actually achieve the goal the product was created to help them to achieve?

We were counting how people were using the product, but we weren’t tracking if their actions led to their desired results.

This made me reconsider what kind of metrics can be called “success metrics” rather than “activity metrics.”

How do you choose the meaningful events to track when releasing your product?