Beyond "did it ship", success has multiple dimensions.
1. Adoption metrics
- Daily/weekly active users — what percentage of licensed users log in regularly?
- Feature usage — are key features being used? Which features sit unused?
- Records created — is data flowing in?
- Time spent in Salesforce vs alternatives (sales reps still in Excel = adoption issue).
Source: Lightning Usage App, Event Monitoring, custom reports.
2. Business outcomes
- Revenue impact: pipeline coverage, win rate, deal velocity.
- Operational efficiency: case resolution time, agent productivity, sales cycle length.
- Customer satisfaction: CSAT, NPS movement.
- Cost reduction: legacy systems decommissioned, manual work automated.
These should map back to the project's original justification ("we said this would improve X by Y%; did it?").
3. Quality metrics
- Defect rates — open vs closed; severity distribution.
- Production incidents — frequency and impact.
- Code quality — test coverage, PMD findings, audit findings.
4. Process maturity
- Release cadence — how often can you deploy without drama?
- Time from idea to production — backlog -> live.
- Rollback rate — how often do you have to undo deploys?
5. User sentiment
- Surveys — quantitative satisfaction scores.
- Focus groups / interviews — qualitative depth.
- Support ticket trends — declining = positive.
6. Project metrics (retroactive)
- On-time delivery — did we hit the agreed milestones?
- On-budget delivery — did we stay within budget?
- Scope delivery — did we deliver the agreed scope (or did we cut)?
Common pitfalls:
- Measuring activity, not outcome. "10,000 records created!" — but did revenue go up?
- Vanity metrics: login counts without depth. A user logged in for 30 seconds is not engaged.
- No baseline. Can't measure improvement without knowing where you started.
- Measuring too late. Should be capturing baselines before launch and tracking continuously.
- Measuring only at launch. The 6-month and 12-month measurements often differ significantly from launch-day.
Reporting cadence:
- Weekly during hypercare (open issues, adoption trend).
- Monthly for first 6 months (business outcomes, adoption depth).
- Quarterly thereafter (strategic view, ROI calculations).
Senior consultant insight: define success metrics during Discovery, not at the end. "What does success look like 12 months after go-live?" — that conversation often reshapes scope.
The most senior framing: success is users choosing Salesforce over alternatives. If reps still use Excel, you didn't really succeed — even if the dashboards are pretty.