Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

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

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

When Steve Jobs set goals, he kept them shockingly simple and didn't include any metrics or benchmarks. Are specific, measurable goals a waste of time?

Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.

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