Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
how to measure what matters + philosophical musings on whether the important things can be measured
by sari and · updated 2mo ago
Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
- 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 hav... See morefrom The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov
sari added 5mo ago
- 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 t... See more
sari added 6mo ago
- Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.
from Offscreen Magazine Interview by Craig Mod
sari added 8mo ago
- 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, citatio... See more
from PhilPapers
sari added 9mo ago
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen
Which leads on to my next point. See, not only do numbers not capture what matters (love, happiness, awe, spirituality, creativity are by definition unquantifiable beyond mere surface appearances) they are also extremely open to manipulation.
from The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace by thomasjbevan.substack.com
sari added 1y ago
- Finding the right metric
Ted Merz, who used to be the Global Head of News Product at Bloomberg, has an insightful article about how the company's founder (Mike Bloomberg) uses metrics as a management tool. One metric that is prominently displayed around the office on TV screens is the number of Bloomberg terminals sold year-to-date.
This single numbe... See moreandrea added 1y ago
- 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
from The Tyranny of Metrics Quotes by Jerry Z. Muller
sari added 1y ago
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 peo
from The Data-Informed Manifesto by Julie Zhuo
sari added 1y ago
- there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.
this mindset has l... See morefrom Optimizing for Feelings by browsercompany.substack.com
sari added 1y ago