Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
how to measure what matters + philosophical musings on whether the important things can be measured
sari and
Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
There is a common issue of over-optimizing the metrics in business, which can damage the whole system.
Doing the wrong thing efficiently is actually worse than doing the right thing badly.
– Rory Sutherland
When Steve Jobs set goals, he kept them shockingly simple and didn't include any metrics or benchmarks.
Are specific, measurable goals a waste of time?
How did people respond? Did I strike an emotional nerve? This goes beyond easy, legible metrics like pageviews or social media likes, or even comments, which are at best hazy approximations of external resonance. It’s about looking for signals that something genuinely MATTERED to one or more humans, and elicited a response that’s out of proportion with the average digital interaction. Lots of likes is an okay-ish signal. Lots of comments is a clearer signal. A small handful of comments or private replies from people saying they’ve never felt so seen or understood by a piece of writing – that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to discern and quantify here.
Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Jascha Sohl-Dicksteinsohl-dickstein.github.io
aura = body
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those val-ues; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets,... See more
PhilPapers
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen
We believe that being data-informed comes down to internalizing a set of values. These are simple, few, yet exceedingly powerful:
- Conviction around a purpose rather than searching for meaning in numbers
- Setting verifiable goals rather than vague aspirations
- Company-wide familiarity with metrics rather than outsourcing to “data people”
- Active
Julie Zhuo • The Data-Informed Manifesto
People who insist that every product decision should be metrics-driven would also have to logically admit that theirs will be the first job to get automated by AI.
Shreyas Doshix.comWe don’t track time on site on Sublime. We also don’t track passive consumption. We only track people actively building and curating their library (which itself is not a perfect metric - because we don’t want to incentivize collecting. we want to incentivize creating with your knowledge) but is better than time on platform.
If a platform enables
... See more