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...
Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals
ribbonfarm.com
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.
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
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
John Doerr • 8 highlights
amazon.com
From Andy Barnes:
The idea that all of the world should be measured in dollars to stockholders is actually a relatively new idea. It used to be that we thought that businesses had their purpose. Your purpose was to be making newspapers or fountain pens or whatever. And now we act as though the only purpose of a business was to enrich the people ... See more
Which 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.
thomasjbevan.substack.com • The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace
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
aura = body