Metadata
- Author: Abhi Sivasailam
- Full Title:: You Need More Metrics.
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: data team vision and mission, Data Team Vision and Mission,
- URL:: https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/you-need-more-metrics
- Finished date:: 2023-06-19
Highlights
The best way for “data teams” to do this is to focus their energy on making sure two of the most important components of a company’s OS (The Big Two) land and land well.
Business Reviews are how a company monitors, introspects and recalibrates. Planning Cycles are how a company decides how to invest its resources in and for the future. Taken together, these two processes shape most of how the company works and what it produces. As such, they are incredibly high-leverage. (View Highlight)
One of the primary outcomes we want from MBRs is to create a shared reality around the physics of the business. We want leaders to see reality the same way so they can reason collaboratively about the past, present, and future of the business. (View Highlight)
Companies with few metrics to work with are poor on facts. Their view of reality is murky and incomplete and, because context remains tacit and diffuse, inconsistent. (View Highlight)
Meanwhile, companies with richer sets of metrics have a picture of reality that is in far higher resolution. That makes for a better foundation for building alignment, understanding, and continuous learning (View Highlight)
At these companies, more metrics doesn’t have to mean less focus — if done right, it can mean more. Operators can still stick to a bounded, manageable set of goals and targets and [what Amazon calls] “Output” Metrics. But a wider range of “Controllable Input” Metrics can help narrow the aperture on how and where to innovate and experiment. And over time, operators develop a “fingertip feel” for the full constellation of metrics, their patterns, and the relationships between them — an intuition that can be as fast and reliable as more robust analyses. (View Highlight)
Dashboard sprawl is a result of metrics done badly, not a necessary consequence of having more of them. Dashboard sprawl happens when leaders don’t understand the mechanics of their business and when they haven’t established data feedback loops that govern metrics through their lifecycle (View Highlight)
Most companies don’t have analysts with the skill, experience, and context to design 100s of metrics that generate more light than heat (View Highlight)
And most company operators and leaders don’t have the analytical maturity to make sense of that many metrics. (Though, importantly, with respect to the latter conditions, I’d argue that generating and consuming lots of metrics is the best way to build the requisite maturity!) (View Highlight)
But it’s crucial not to start too small either (View Highlight)