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...
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Douglas W. Hubbard • 6 highlights
amazon.com
Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.
Craig Mod • Offscreen Magazine Interview
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.
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.
thomasjbevan.substack.com • The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace
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
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
Article
tensions of product decisions/metrics
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... See more
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... See more