Plato's Dashboards

> So let's circle back to metrics and ways to ensure we use them for guidance rather than obey them reflexively.

I'm not sure this is the right framing of the problem. "Guidance" is too nebulous and leaves us with the same problem of interpretation.

    Advice from an old tracker: You want to find someone, use your eyes.

When I have someone who is getting themselves/us in trouble by looking at charts, my remedy always includes the notion that charts are for asking questions, not answering them. You might have a chart that says user response time has improved, but have you tried using the service from your phone (with wifi disabled)? If the chart says the times are shifting, we need to know why they are shifting, because that's information. "Looks like response time went down," is only useful as the introduction to a question, like, "did we change something?" or "did we have a routing issue?", or "can we do the same thing on this other service that is drawing complaints?"

Getting good questions also often involves cleaning up sources of noise in the charts. It's too easy for someone with an axe to grind to jump to conclusions that this is a repeat of a problem we had before (ie, this is Team X's fault... again) or that lack of improvement means failure to act. It is not impossible that I fix one regression at the same time someone else causes another, or changes the denominator by the same magnitude as the fix.

I don't have much to add other than this reminds me of the obsession around "satisfaction" for product metrics and why that seems to always boil down to slapping NPS on it because it's a number and execs like numbers.

I think this is essential reading if anyone's interested on a product-focused tangent for the topic: https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmf...

The only thing that matters is revenue, and if it can't be easily measured against revenue it doesn't exist. I am so tired of this line of reasoning. It's poisoning the industry, ruining products, and sucking the joy out of work.

What about making a quality product because you have a passion for it? Nope, make a broken MVP and move on to the next customer.

If I can't maintain a metric until I can tie it to revenue, then I guess I don't get cpu usage on our database. Or disk usage. Or response time for anything that only employees touch. Bad data and errors are fine as long as no one complains. Actually, if we produce a shitty product long enough everyone will get used to it and stop complaining. If we stop measuring error rates we can stop wasting time on fixing things right? Tests and code refactors just get in the way of delivering that MVP. Rewards are doled out for fixing an outage, and preventing them is a cost-center to be eliminated.

On the flip side, now we've got KPIs for our ability to push things through the corporate bureaucracy. I didn't become a programmer so I can waste time estimating how long it'll take to produce a design doc that'll be useless by the time I get to implementation, just so a bureaucrat can decide if some deeply technical problem they don't understand should be fixed.

There has to be a better way.

Net Promoter Score: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score

How likely are people to promote the thing?

Yes; it's a trade-off due to how difficult it is to make people give a shit about the short-term---forget about the long-term (if there's no stock involved. We've barely figured out how to make CEOs tuned into the "long-term").

The corp is just a vehicle for the goals of all its passengers. Most of them are only on-board for a couple of stops, and then off to the next vehicle. To voluntarily forgo getting off at your stop, without receiving something of equal or greater value, seems awfully foolish.