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.
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
People who insist that every product decision should be metrics-driven would also have to logically admit that theirs will be the first job to get automated by AI.
“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
there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.
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