A CTO and a CEO sit in the same meeting. Asked whether everything is tracked, the CTO says yes, as nearly every engineering leader does. The CEO says the company could do much better. Teemu Kinos singles it out as the best conversation Skene had, because the two answers put the whole problem in one room.
The short answer: Nobody wants to track things; they have questions, and the questions arrive while someone is using the product or talking to a user, never at development time.
What Teemu Kinos trusts, and for what
| Evidence | Trusted for | Not trusted for |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering's answer: everything is tracked | What engineering believes it has shipped | The business questions nobody filed as tickets |
| The business side's answer: we could do better | Knowing which questions matter | Knowing what already exists in the code |
| An event added today | Answers in a few weeks, once volume builds | Any question about the past |
| Talking to a handful of customers | Learning, below a handful of customers | Replacing measurement as accounts grow |
Why a sponsor commissioned the questions
Skene's open-source community kept saying it loved the product, and the love turned into neither money nor insight. A third party asking the questions gets past politeness, so Skene commissioned ten interviews from A Founder's Friend. Thirteen were delivered, each signed off by the person in it. For the closing issue, the sponsor sat on the answering side and Richard Makara asked the questions.
Richard is a go-to-market engineer who once built a whole sales and marketing data warehouse before AI. He remembers tracking that could not change without begging the product team, and a product team that split a signup form in two and broke everything downstream. He arrived with no reason to be gentle.
The CTO and the CEO
Teemu's account of the fault line is about incentives, not competence. Engineering and the business sit in different teams with different motivations, each judged on its own KPIs. Tracking is rarely one of engineering's, so engineering reports that everything is tracked while the business side holds the questions.
The recording adds that business people often cannot see what the code already records, or whether a needed event could be composed from two or three existing ones. The question that follows, between that CTO and CEO, is whether a tool like Skene adds work for engineering.
99% will say that all the events are being tracked.
The data you cannot get back
Teemu walks through the arithmetic of a late question. A growth lead asks engineering for an event. It may wait for the next sprint; pushed hard, it ships within a week, or in a perfect world the same day.
Either way, the event then needs weeks of traffic before it says anything. The cost is not only the data missing today, but the data still missing in the future, when the question needs an answer.
the day that you don't track today, you're not going to be able to get it back tomorrow
What Richard took from the pitch
The issue's summary records Richard's read: Skene sells autonomy to the growth team and, underneath that, a shift of responsibility away from engineering, and the second is the harder sell. It also records what the research changed for Skene. It confirmed the kind of company Skene should not sell to, and it confirmed that below a handful of customers, talking to people beats tracking them.
What to do with this
Ask your engineering lead and your growth lead the same question separately: are we tracking what we need to prove last quarter's launches worked? If the answers differ, the gap between them is your tracking plan. The free audit maps what your product collects today, so both sides can argue from the same list.
For seven checks drawn from across the series, see the questions to ask before trusting a number.
Frameworks this interview tests
- AARRR (pirate metrics): Dave McClure's AARRR pirate metrics count acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. Each stage rests on one or two events; activation breaks most often.
Read next in The Question
Source and disclosure
Read Issue 14 on A Founder's Friend. The full interview is for subscribers. This page paraphrases it and quotes nothing that sits behind the paywall.
Skene sponsored this research and commissioned it on a single question. A Founder's Friend ran the interviews, wrote them up and published them, and the series states that Skene paid for the research and did not direct the questions, the analysis or the conclusions. Each of the thirteen interviews was reviewed and signed off by the person in it, named or anonymous by their choice. Appearing in the series is not an endorsement of Skene, and nobody here is presented as a Skene customer.