Focus on“HOW” you measure what matters

Let’s start with watching this clip from the last year where the former Indian cricket team captain mentioned that “The result is a… -

Focus on“HOW” you measure what matters

Let’s start with watching this clip from the last year where the former Indian cricket team captain mentioned that “The result is a byproduct of a process… ” —

credit to the video creator.

His perspective is right, and I stand nowhere to comment on this magnificent personality, he is an athlete, a sportsman, and a great leader, and it’s very important to get the process right. I heard this speech last year, and there was an appeal here, that clicked in and stayed with me.

I believe in the process, and more importantly to iterate over on it to get to the right one. Let me share one incident —

> If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. — Yogi Berra


2.5 months back, I started training with 15mi bike a day, open fitness goal, kill kilocalories targets, and have been executing on it.

I found, setting and seeing the targets’ hit, provide you a cognitive equilibrium, that is very important when you’re living with the unknowns, uncertainty and in this pandemic, that your brain is training itself to adapt the new normal daily.

Not so surprising, one day, I was tracking my progress, and forgot to stop tracking the progress, and boom, received a popup, you have met your daily goal, really, how? Just sitting and watching TV. Yes, I hit my target and was not happy about it…

It was not achieved with the right process!

It was an apple watch bug that keeps on tracking and burning your calories and giving you a false positive number.

Let me share a recent discussion that I had with one of my friends related to the high-quality code—

I: What do you do for increasing the code quality?

She: We set a target to have “X number of reviews a month” towards our “High-quality code delivery” objective.

I: How do you measure the reviews?

She: We collect the number from Github once a review happens, and update the key result.

As the quarter progresses, you focus on the number and start opening more PRs, rather than iterating over the process. You can argue that this is not the right key result (though every alternate engineering team sets and measures it), there might be a lateral alignment between the code quality and the PR reviews. You got to find that, iterate and set the process right.

Is hitting the number of PRs’ targets increasing the quality? We can not assert that!

The moment you focus on quantification to achieve your results and discount your methods to achieve, these numbers are nothing more than color attributes to your graph. It looks green, but it’s as bad as the false positive due to the Apple watch’s bug.

Let me share another discussion of my friend who has recently started his app startup and measuring the two most common key results- X number of daily downloads and Y% daily active users.

I: How often do you look at your key results?

He: weekly

I: How do you get your data points?

He: We have it automated from our FullStory app.

I: What is your process to hit the numbers?

He: We run campaigns, ads, referrals, and push notifications.

What are the issues here?

1. Miss alignment on the call to action and the measure’s cadence, he is losing 7 days to act on the key results that they want to achieve daily. 2. There is no method, playbook he has, to run, iterate and implement.

I believe, that DAU is one of the most misunderstood metrics, where you measure a KPI (and it’s a very good KPI), a trend rather than a key result. The call to action has the smallest turnaround time, that you can not iterate.

Let me share another discussion from a meeting when I was in a bigger company, I remember, one of the engineering managers mentioned that we have to reduce the number of field bugs, let’s measure —Reduce weekly field reported bugs by X%.

We all agreed, it was a great key result at that time, and as we made progress on it, it became a week bug reporting, with no call to action. At the quarter-end, we had a good trend report of the bugs, reported weekly, and with no progress made to hit the target.

> As I see now, what was wrong there? We didn’t have our methods right to put the right processes in place.

Next time, you measure what matters and asking — What is most important for the next three months and when you have your key results?

You got to ask —

> How do you measure those priorities? What are your methods to achieve those outcomes? And you will get the right process to iterate. Else you will be hitting the numbers like a couch potato with the watch.