Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

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

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 re... See more

We don’t track time on site on Sublime. We also don’t track passive consumption. We only track people actively building and curating their library (which itself is not a perfect metric - because we don’t want to incentivize collecting. we want to incentivize creating with your knowledge) but is better than time on platform.

If a platform enables yo

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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

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