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.comthere’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.
this mindset has... See more
this mindset has... See more
The Browser Company • Optimizing For Feelings
quality has no discernable metric
-miter
We believe that being data-informed comes down to internalizing a set of values. These are simple, few, yet exceedingly powerful:
- Conviction around a purpose rather than searching for meaning in numbers
- Setting verifiable goals rather than vague aspirations
- Company-wide familiarity with metrics rather than outsourcing to “data people”
- Active
Julie Zhuo • The Data-Informed Manifesto
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.
Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Jascha Sohl-Dicksteinsohl-dickstein.github.ioWhich 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.