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Q3 north star: reduce time-to-first-answer

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Q3 north star: reduce time-to-first-answer

The single metric the whole company is steering by this quarter, with the reasoning and the guardrails behind it.

ME Owner · Maren EllisUpdated 1d agoReview date · 90 days from last edit
Decision made 12 May. Revisit only if weekly active editors drop below 62% for three consecutive weeks.

Why this metric

Across 41 onboarding interviews, teams did not churn because a feature was missing. They churned because finding a decision took longer than re-making it. Time-to-first-answer is the honest proxy for that pain: median seconds from opening the workspace to landing on the page that resolves the question.

Median time-to-answer

18s

-41% QoQ

Weekly active editors

71%

+6 pts

Docs with an owner

88%

+23 pts

Guardrails

  • No metric win that increases page count faster than page retirement.
  • Search quality is measured on answers accepted, never on clicks.
  • Every workspace object keeps a named owner and a review date.

We had six sources of truth, which is the same as none. Cutting to one was worth more than any new feature.

VP Engineering, design partner #4

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