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...
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.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.
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... See more