Rob Harrop

After reading my recent post, Answer the Obvious Questions, my friend Glyn Normington introduced me to Completed Staff Work.

I’d not heard of this before, but as I read the Wikipedia article, I realised I’ve developed a slew of techniques to ensure that my staff work is as complete as possible when I share it with my colleagues.

Several of these techniques relate to communicating changes in business metrics like revenue, user retention and system reliability.

Consider the case of quarterly revenue updates. You might start with something like “Revenue in Q3 hit $10M”. There’s nothing wrong with this sentence, but it’s not complete. Important questions demand an answer before I consider this update complete.

Describe the Direction of Change

First up, in what direction has the number changed? Is revenue up, or is it down? A better version of the update says, “Revenue in Q3 is up to $10M.”

Be careful with words like “up” and “down” when referring to metrics that aren’t universally understood: not everybody will know whether “up” is good or bad.

Consider a technical metric like page load speed. A sentence like “Page load speed is up to 1.2 seconds” will confuse readers who aren’t sure whether the page load speed going up is an improvement or not.

I prefer to be more precise in these situations: “page load speed deteriorated to 1.2 seconds” or “page load speed improved to 1.2 seconds.”

From What, To What

Once the reader knows the direction of change, the next likely question is: “What was the metric value before the change?” Don’t make the reader ask this; include that information in your update: “Revenue hit $10M in Q3, up from $9M in Q2.”

Your audience will often contextualise changes by the magnitude, absolute or relative. Save them time and do the sums upfront: “Revenue hit $10M in Q3, up 11.1% from $9M in Q2.”

Use absolute change ($1M) or percentage change (11.1%), depending on which makes the most sense for your audience.

Talk About Targets

Sometimes, metrics improve, but not enough. Other times, they degrade without meaningful impact to the business.

Where you can, it’s helpful to anchor your writing about business metrics to the targets for those metrics. For example: “Revenue hit $10M in Q3, up 11.1% from $9M in Q2, beating our target of $9.8M by $200K.”

Don’t be tempted to hide the fact if a target is missed. I’ve found that nothing erodes trust faster than when difficult situations are hidden from critical stakeholders.

If you miss a target, say why: “Revenue hit $9.5M in Q3, ..., missing our target of $9.8M by $300K. The Ever Given container ship blocked the Suez Canal, disrupting the supply chain and reducing available stock by 12%.”

Be Careful with Percentages

Metrics expressed as percentages are a regular source of confusion. If the churn rate drops from 10% to 9%, is that a 1% or 10% drop? It’s a 10% drop and a one percentage point drop.

Percentages and percentage points are often confused, even by those who should know better. In the 2024 UK Budget, Employers’ National Insurance increased 1.2 percentage points from 13.8% to 15% (an 8.7% change). Business & Accounting Daily had this to say:

In a tax raising Budget, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased employers’ national insurance by 1.2% to 15% from April 2025

My solution is to use percentage points to talk about change and to always show the before and after values. It’s the before and after values that remove the ambiguity.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased Employers’ National Insurance by 1.2 percentage points from 13.8% to 15%.

Summary

You don’t need to write paragraphs of text to pack your metrics updates full of juicy information.

Describe the direction of change, whether that direction is good or bad, what the metric was before the change and how the change relates to targets and you’ll answer your audience’s likely questions.

Put all this information in the first one or two sentences in a memo or in the title of a slide in an update deck. Save the paragaphs of text for supporting information; don’t make your readers go hunting for answers to common questions.