Fear and Metrics

One of the patterns that’s the most common in the technical world is the tension between short and long term thinking. Navigating it successfully is a critical part of being a good engineer or entrepreneur. Some of these challenges are fairly obvious - investing in code design vs quick hacking, for example, or generalizing patterns vs copy/paste.

Some of them are more subtle though. One of these has to do with how teams engage with product metrics. There are lots of different ways to measure the success of a product - latency, engagement, growth, stability, etc. Let’s pick one of them - growth.

There are a few ways to measure growth. One is absolute - how many more DAU do we have this week, relative to last week - that gives us a percentage growth rate. The other way is to look at share - what’s the market we are in, and how is our share of active users changing in that market?

The first one is easier to “lie” about - for example, during covid, lots of products increased absolute use but decreased relative share. Here’s the short/long tradeoff though: it’s easier and more comfortable to pick the version of a metric (growth in this example, but any metric has different forms like this) that tells you the story you’re comfortable hearing.

But that comfort is the short term thinking - it might make it less disruptive to your group or company in the short term, but it’s not really healthy in the long term (just like hacking eventually leads to tech debt - this is kind of the equivalent for metrics).

As is usually the case, there’s no simple answer to this problem, though there are tools in the toolkit - setting up pre-commits (in this case, measuring the long term OKRs that really matter to the company), building complementary processes where some external factor (an analytics group, say) is explicitly tasked with making sure the hard questions are being asked, committing in public, etc.

It’s subtle, but it’s important to look for ways in which we trade off near term comfort for long term health and growth.