> An ambitious PM has a bunch of metrics in a dashboard. The PM uses them for things like: showing how well their team is doing, and asking for a raise, and asking for more resources.
[metrics turn out to be useless]
Key business metrics (relating to money and growth) matter but nearly everything else doesn't because of the difficulty of attribution.
Usually it doesn't matter because at a certain company size, everyone is just playing the game. The PM's middle manager boss asked for metrics because it "looks bad" that so much decision making is based on experience, judgement, internal politics and who has favour at any given time. The PM correctly "read the room" and created a bunch of metrics and a dashboard to help everyone pretend that things work otherwise.
The end goal of creating the metrics is really the opposite of the stated goal (accountability / transparency) - it's diffusion or deflection of responsibility.
Actually everyone is still just making things up. But the subjectivity has been swept under the rug, hidden in the choice of metrics, how they are measured, how much importance we place on them and the stories we tell about why they changed. In enterprises, this is not a bug, it's the whole point :/
Reading this back it feels too nihilistic; maybe there are places where "internal metrics" work well. Interested to hear dissenting viewpoints.
xyzzy123•6mo ago
[metrics turn out to be useless]
Key business metrics (relating to money and growth) matter but nearly everything else doesn't because of the difficulty of attribution.
Usually it doesn't matter because at a certain company size, everyone is just playing the game. The PM's middle manager boss asked for metrics because it "looks bad" that so much decision making is based on experience, judgement, internal politics and who has favour at any given time. The PM correctly "read the room" and created a bunch of metrics and a dashboard to help everyone pretend that things work otherwise.
The end goal of creating the metrics is really the opposite of the stated goal (accountability / transparency) - it's diffusion or deflection of responsibility.
Actually everyone is still just making things up. But the subjectivity has been swept under the rug, hidden in the choice of metrics, how they are measured, how much importance we place on them and the stories we tell about why they changed. In enterprises, this is not a bug, it's the whole point :/
Reading this back it feels too nihilistic; maybe there are places where "internal metrics" work well. Interested to hear dissenting viewpoints.