Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

It’s wild that some mid level PM is making design tweaks for “retention” and ends up completely tearing the entire fabric of our society into a downward spiral of gamified virtual hot people musical chairs. “What if we added a bursting emoji heart?!” = Birthrates fall to zero

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?

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 more

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

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