Metric Tree

A metric tree decomposes one top-level metric into the multiplicative or additive components that produce it, so each team can see which branch its work moves.

The construction rule is that each node connects to its parent through exactly one arithmetic operator: orders equals visitors times conversion rate, and conversion rate itself breaks into cart and checkout step rates. A good tree has two properties: branches do not overlap, and every leaf is genuinely measured. What is often labelled a metric tree but wires nodes together with the phrase influences is a brainstorming map rather than a decomposition, and it cannot say how much of an upstream change a branch explains. That attribution of movement is the whole point: turning a vague drop in the headline metric into one branch with one owner.