Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.

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

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

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

We believe that being data-informed comes down to internalizing a set of values. These are simple, few, yet exceedingly powerful:

1. Conviction around a purpose  rather than searching for meaning in numbers


2. Setting verifiable goals  rather than vague aspirations


3. Company-wide familiarity with metrics  rather than outsourcing to “data people”


4. Active

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