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...
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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Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Jascha Sohl-Dicksteinsohl-dickstein.github.ioHuman pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.
Craig Mod • Offscreen Magazine Interview
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
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.
this mindset has l... See more
this mindset has l... See more
The Browser Company • Optimizing for Feelings
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.
We believe that being data-informed comes down to internalizing a set of values. These are simple, few, yet exceedingly powerful:
- Conviction around a purpose rather than searching for meaning in numbers
- Setting verifiable goals rather than vague aspirations
- Company-wide familiarity with metrics rather than outsourcing to “data peo
Julie Zhuo • The Data-Informed Manifesto
