A metric is any number you can track. Website visits, employee NPS, average deal size, support ticket volume — all metrics. Most companies have hundreds of them.
A KPI — a key performance indicator — is a metric you've chosen because it serves as a leading indicator of strategic progress. The word "key" is doing the work here. Not all metrics are keys.
Most companies call everything a KPI. Which means nothing is.
The three tests for KPI status
A metric earns KPI status if it passes three tests.
Test 1: Is it directly connected to a strategic objective? A KPI without a strategic objective attached to it isn't a performance indicator — it's a tracking habit. Revenue growth is a metric. Revenue growth from new enterprise customers in the DACH region, connected to the objective of expanding the enterprise segment, is a KPI.
Test 2: Does it change when strategy execution improves? Some metrics move regardless of whether you're executing your strategy well. Some metrics move precisely because you are. KPIs should be in the second category — they should be sensitive to strategic performance, not just to general activity.
Test 3: Does someone own it? A metric without an owner is just a number in a dashboard. A KPI needs a single accountable person who is responsible for understanding it, influencing it, and explaining it when it moves in the wrong direction.
Why the confusion matters
When everything is a KPI, leadership attention is diluted across dozens of numbers. The genuinely important signals — the ones connected to strategic bets — get lost in the noise of operational tracking.
The real cost of KPI inflation isn't the time spent looking at too many numbers. It's the decisions that don't get made because the signal for making them is buried.
What good looks like
A company with good KPI discipline has five to ten KPIs at the company level, each directly connected to a strategic objective, each with a named owner, each reviewed in the context of the goal it's meant to move.
Everything else is a metric — useful to track, not necessarily useful to review at leadership level.
In Vindaris, KPIs sit adjacent to the goals they serve and the work meant to move them. The connection isn't a label — it's structural. When the KPI moves, you can trace it back to the work that caused the movement.