Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

One of the most bizarre contradictions in modern software is that the people building these engagement systems don’t like them either!

Ask anyone who works on onboarding popups, feature tours, lifecycle messaging, or in-app announcements how they feel when an app interrupts them mid-flow to announce something they didn’t ask for. The answer is... See more

But ambiguity, taste, meaning, value, these remain hard to attain within the hierarchy of verifiability. “Intelligence” races ahead wherever the rewards are liquid and the outcome is easy to check, but it lags at the edges: in murky context, slow feedback, or spaces where the answer is more felt than measured.

While it’s tempting to believe a model... See more

“One of the reasons the tech industry is so creatively bankrupt is that people just focus on attributes you can measure,” said Jony Ive, when told of the insecurity Kushner had confided to Rick Rubin. “I was very lucky at Apple, because Steve [Jobs] showed me there was a way to articulate things like sensibility, intuition, taste, which all start... See more

In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User .

Simply put, companies building apps... See more

The concept of efficiency — how much one can accomplish per unit of time (or per dollar, etc.) — requires a quantitative numerator as well as a denominator. It requires a metric. Therefore, it tells us nothing about results we cannot quantify or measure. When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while... See more

Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.