Journal · 3 March 2026
Why DAU is a poor north star for utilities
Daily active users were popularised by products that want to be opened out of boredom. A bin-day app, a parking permit renewal, a meter reading — these are closer to a hammer. If the hammer works, you put it down. Measuring hammers by how often they are held is how you start adding streaks to a council service.
Pipeline Nodecore sits in Finningly and sees this mistake with tedious regularity. A team copies a social network’s north star because the analytics vendor’s demo used it. Then the product gets “healthier” when onboarding is confusing and people reopen the app to finish a job they should have finished once.
What to use instead
Ask what done looks like. For the Leeds civic case, activation became “retrieved a collection schedule for the signed-in address,” not “opened in week one.” The seven-day open rate barely moved after they unblocked the address step. The share of new accounts that reached the schedule event did move. That is a north star with a job.
For a utility billed monthly, a qualifying action might be a successful submission, not a session. For a weather app, Saturday users and Tuesday users may need separate stars; blending them is how you design for nobody. Retention Atlas exists for teams who already believe this and still average the curves anyway.
When DAU is still allowed in the room
As a diagnostic, not a judge. A sudden drop in daily opens can mean an outage, a store listing failure, or a holiday. It cannot mean the product is “less loved” if love was never the job. Put DAU in the appendix with downloads. Lead with the action that pays the rent or fulfils the statutory duty.
If your investors only recognise DAU, educate them once in writing. Repeating the vendor default is not a strategy. It is how App Analytics becomes a costume for a product you have not described.