Building something no one else can measure
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Building something no one else can measure
We optimize for proxy metrics, because we don’t have a more accurate way to measure goals. In education, we seem at best capable of measuring test scores, not actual aptitude. In media, we use time spent as a proxy for customer value.
Andrew Kortina • Metrics, Incrementalism, and Local Maxima
In the high modernist world we live in, we can adapt Drucker’s dictum that “whatever is measured improves” to a more true-to-reality, but less elegant “whatever is legible improves, unless there are second-order consequences which undermine or destroy the original intention.”
taylorpearson.me • The Illegible Margin: Profiting From the Gap Between the Map and the Territory
While these specific methods aren’t applicable to every networked product, there is an important idea at the core: any product that’s in a head-to-head race with competitors should track the outcomes—market share, active users, engagement, or otherwise—while they execute in the market, to put together cause and effect. A marketplace startup might m
... See moreAndrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we re... See more
The Tyranny of Metrics Quotes by Jerry Z. Muller
Our measurements are our agreed-upon codes for what matters, but once they are installed into our culture, it can be very hard to know when it’s time to rethink how we measure things in the first place. Our beliefs and feelings have a tendency to move forward before we have the models to describe them and the artifacts of culture – language, norms,... See more
Creating New Units of Culture
Amazon argues that it’s not enough to know your output metrics. In fact, they go even further, and say that you shouldn’t pay much attention to your output metrics; you should pay attention to the controllable input metrics that you know will affect those output metrics. It is a very different thing when, say, your customer support team knows that ... See more