Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

how to measure what matters + philosophical musings on whether the important things can be measured

Measuring what matters

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.

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... See more

Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User

sari

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

The Tyranny of Metrics Quotes by Jerry Z. Muller

sari

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

phoebe

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... See more

sari

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

John Fio x.com

andrea

ssari

aura = body

Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein sohl-dickstein.github.io

sari

Your Necessary First Step to Creating Powerful UX Metrics

Jared M. Spool articles.uie.com

Adam Zeiner