alt Hacker NewsA measure is only good if I take action on it and in turn make things better. There are a lot of things that are easy to measure, but there is no useful action I should take on the measure.
A measure is only good if I take action on it and in turn make things better. There are a lot of things that are easy to measure, but there is no useful action I should take on the measure.
Yes, but also all too often “useful” is interpreted to mean “moves the metric”. If that metric is merely a proxy for some more tangible outcome then that may not be good enough.
The one that tech tends to stumble on most often is velocity-type metrics. The problem there is that you can’t pay the bills with velocity. And velocity metrics tend to favor cheap shovelware features that cohere poorly over anything that involves having the team slow down on churning out code long enough to work out elegant solutions to subtle problems.