Comment by jaynate
7 months ago
Agree you have to mix qualitative with the quantitative, but the best metrics systems don't just measure one quantity metric. They should be paired with a quality metric.
Example: User Growth & Customer Engagement
Have to have user growth and retention. If you looked at just one or the other, you'd be missing half the equation.
I think that a good portion of the problem is that there are groups involved in metrics:
1) People setting the metrics
2) People implementing/calculating the metrics
3) People working on improving the metrics (ie product work)
2 is specially complicated for a lot of software products because it can some times be really hard to measure and can be tweaked/manipulated. For example, the MAU twitter figures from the buyout that Musk keeps complaining about, or Blizzard constantly switching their MAU definition.
Often 2 and 3 are the same people and 1 is almost always upper management. I argue that 1 and 2 should be a single group of people (that doesn't work on the product at all) and not directly subject to upper management and not tracked by the same metrics they implement (or tracked by any metrics at all).
Absurdity, unfairness, and failure often result from selective blindness to reality, whether willful or unintentional. Hyperlogical people sometimes lack empathy or an ability to conceive of, to understand, or prefer to trivialize ambiguous situations, politics, biases, human factors, or nonfunctional requirements. Always keep looking for one's own and organizational blind spots.