Why defining value matters more than measuring it
by Anna Brooke 10 July 26Pharma has access to more digital data than ever before. Engagement metrics, analytics platforms and reporting tools can provide increasingly detailed views of how people interact with digital experiences.
Yet many organisations still struggle with a more fundamental challenge: knowing whether they are solving the right problems in the first place.
When measurement is discussed, attention often focuses on what should be tracked and how success should be reported. These are important considerations, but they sit further downstream than many realise. Long before specific metrics are selected, decisions are being made about what success looks like, which opportunities are worth pursuing, and how users are expected to engage with an experience.
The challenge is that these decisions are often shaped primarily by business objectives, with less attention given to the needs, motivations and tasks users are trying to accomplish. As a result, organisations can become highly effective at measuring activity, without necessarily knowing whether they are creating value for the end user.
Why delivery often wins over understanding
Most organisations recognise the value of customer understanding, but when priorities compete, insight activities are often weighed against more immediate delivery pressures.
Digital teams are expected to demonstrate progress, deliver against ambitious timelines, respond to stakeholder expectations and justify investment. In this environment, delivery creates visible evidence of progress, while understanding often remains less tangible and harder to defend when timelines and budgets come under pressure.
As a result, teams can move quickly into execution while spending less time validating assumptions or understanding user needs. Progress is often easier to demonstrate through outputs than through learning. The real risk is defining success around organisational goals before asking what success looks like from the user's side.
Meaningful measurement starts before metrics
In a previous article for Pharmaphorum, I explored how pharma's reliance on engagement metrics can create an incomplete picture of success. Clicks, downloads and page views can provide useful signals, but on their own they tell us little about whether an experience was genuinely useful, supported decision-making or created value for the people using it.
That challenge remains important, but it also raises a broader question. Before deciding what should be measured, how do we decide what success looks like in the first place?
Many measurement challenges originate long before metrics are selected.
Research from The Digital Reality Check found that 66% of organisations rely primarily on platform analytics and engagement data to inform digital decision-making, while only 29% prioritise first-hand customer research. The result is that organisations can become highly capable of measuring activity within individual channels while investing comparatively less effort in understanding the needs, motivations and context that drive behaviour across the wider customer journey.
The issue is that engagement metrics are often expected to answer questions they were never designed to answer. A dashboard can show whether engagement increased within a particular channel, but it cannot explain how that interaction contributed to a wider customer journey, whether it addressed a meaningful need, reduced effort or helped someone achieve what they came to do.
Clear measurement starts with an understanding of success from both a business and user perspective. Without that foundation, even the most sophisticated reporting risks measuring activity in isolation rather than understanding the value it creates.
The commercial cost of skipping insight
The consequences of this disconnect are increasingly visible across pharma's digital landscape.
When we surveyed 225 senior HCPs for our ‘Value Gap’ research, 65% said they had reduced or stopped engaging with a pharmaceutical company due to poor digital experiences, while 58% believed most pharma digital content is repetitive or irrelevant.
These findings point towards a challenge that many organisations continue to face: creating experiences that are genuinely relevant, useful and easy to engage with. While engagement metrics can indicate whether someone interacted with a piece of content or a platform, they provide far less insight into whether that interaction helped a healthcare professional achieve what they were trying to do.
This matters because organisations can continue investing in content, channels and optimisation efforts without fully understanding whether they are creating meaningful value. As technology and AI make it increasingly easy to produce more content and more interactions, the challenge shifts from output to relevance. Engagement can rise while the underlying impact - for HCPs, the business, and ultimately patients - stays flat.
Why ‘Jobs to be Done’ changes the measurement conversation
Healthcare professionals do not think in channels. They are not trying to complete a website journey, open an email or engage with a particular platform. They are trying to answer a clinical question, build confidence in a treatment decision, prepare for a patient conversation or access information efficiently.
Organisations, however, often measure these interactions through the lens of channels, campaigns and platforms. While this can provide useful performance data, it can also create fragmented views of behaviour that make it difficult to understand the broader journey and the role each interaction plays within it.
Jobs to be Done offers a different perspective. Rather than focusing on where engagement happens, it focuses on what people are trying to achieve. This shifts the conversation from measuring activity to understanding progress.
The distinction has important implications for measurement. Success is no longer defined solely by whether a healthcare professional engaged with a piece of content or completed a journey. Instead, it is defined by whether the experience helped them achieve the outcome they were seeking, whether that was finding information, reducing effort, increasing confidence or supporting better decision-making.
By focusing on underlying needs rather than individual touchpoints, Jobs to be Done helps organisations create success measures that remain relevant regardless of where or how engagement takes place. The result is a more connected understanding of value across customer experiences, organisational priorities and ultimately patient outcomes.
Better measurement starts with better questions
If measurement challenges often begin before measurement itself, the solution is unlikely to be found in better dashboards or additional KPIs. Instead, organisations need to spend more time aligning around what success actually looks like.
Too often, measurement discussions begin with the question: What should we track? A more useful starting point is: What outcomes are we trying to create, for both the organisation and the people we serve?
This shift changes the role of measurement. Rather than acting solely as a reporting mechanism, it becomes a tool for understanding whether experiences are helping users achieve meaningful progress. Success measures become less focused on activity and more focused on outcomes, providing a clearer foundation for decision-making, prioritisation and investment.
As technology continues to make content creation, personalisation and experience delivery easier, the organisations that succeed will not necessarily be those with the most data. They will be those with the clearest understanding of what their users are trying to achieve and the discipline to measure progress against it.
Effective measurement is about creating a shared understanding of what success looks like and ensuring that every metric, from high-level business outcomes to individual behavioural signals, helps organisations understand whether they are moving closer to it.
Because the most expensive mistake in digital is not measuring the wrong thing. It is building, optimising and scaling experiences before defining what success should look like in the first place.
