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 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.
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?
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
Kiwi SaaS Metrics That Matter 2023^LLJ r2.2.pdf
slideshare.net
Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.
Craig Mod • Offscreen Magazine Interview
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 more
Simply put, companies building apps hav... See more
Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User
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
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
PhilPapers
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen