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...
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
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
“One of the reasons the tech industry is so creatively bankrupt is that people just focus on attributes you can measure,” said Jony Ive, when told of the insecurity Kushner had confided to Rick Rubin. “I was very lucky at Apple, because Steve [Jobs] showed me there was a way to articulate things like sensibility, intuition, taste, which all start... See more
The New World: Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream
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... See more
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... See more
Building something no one else can measure
sriramk.com
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
... See moreThere 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
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... See more