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Metric Certification Review Checklist

The recurring pass that keeps certified metrics trustworthy: definitions still match the business, owners still exist, and the certified set stays small enough to mean something.

8 steps · 7 required · last reviewed (next review 2027-03-20) · updated 2026-09-20

Related focus areas:AnalyticsOps

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Run this quarterly against the certified metric set. Certification decays quietly: the definition stays fixed while the business changes around it, and within a year the badge means "nobody has looked at this recently".

Bring the usage logs. The gap between what is certified and what is actually used is usually the most informative thing in the meeting.

  1. Each certified metric has a business owner who still holds that role

    required

    Certification inherited by an empty seat is the most common way a definition becomes unchallengeable.

  2. The owner confirms the definition still matches how the business thinks

    required

    Definitions do not drift; the business drifts away from them, which looks identical from the dashboard.

  3. The metric is computed in exactly one place

    required

    Two implementations of one definition will disagree eventually, and then neither can be trusted.

  4. Dashboards consuming the metric reference the shared definition rather than their own SQL

    required

    A certified definition that dashboards bypass is documentation, not governance.

  5. Certified content is visually distinguishable from exploratory work

    required

    If a viewer cannot tell certified from someone's scratch query, certification buys nothing.

  6. Usage is reviewed and unused certified content is retired

    required

    A certified set that only grows becomes unreviewable, at which point certification stops being a signal.

  7. Changes to a certified definition since the last review were notified to consumers

    required

    A silently changed definition is worse than a disputed one, because nobody knows to argue.

  8. Sensitive fields are restricted at the model layer rather than by convention

    optional

    Access enforced by dashboard design is access enforced by hope.

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Checklists document self-reported practice. Items were last reviewed 2026-09-20 — adapt them to your own environment.