The liberation in choosing just one KPI for your entire company

One of the amazing things about running an ecommerce business is that we have incredible amounts of data at our fingertips, much of it fed to us instantaneously in real-time. At TOP MOT we track more than 200 KPIs on a monthly basis across the whole business and many of them on a daily basis. This allows us to keep our finger on the pulse and react quickly to any patterns we see, steering the company in the best direction possible. However, this also makes it easy to catch "analysis paralysis", get bogged down in the details and lose sight of the big picture.

A while back I watched a talk at Stanford by Shishir Mehrotra, a former exec at YouTube, on how they scaled and what really mattered during that period. One of the things he mentioned was how his team drew inspiration from Ben Hunt-Davis and the story (now a book) about how the British rowing team had gone from being a mediocre team to gold medalists at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games in 2 years by making every single decision by answering one question; will it make the boat go faster? For example, before they decided to sit down on the rowing machines for 70 minutes they asked: "Will it make the boat go faster?" The answer to that question was "Yes", so that's what they did. Should we go to the pub and have a drink? "Will it make the boat go faster?" "Not really." So they didn't go to the pub.

Shishir and the YouTube team implemented the same mindset and in a company offsite announced a new single unifying metric; watch time. From this point, they started to make every single decision based on whether it was going to increase watch time and Shishir shared in his talk how it had revolutionized and streamlined their internal decision making, whilst also allowing them to reach and exceed their watch time goals and targets.

After watching Shishir's talk I read the book by Ben Hunt-Davis and implemented one unifying metric at TOP MOT. We are in a similar situation as YouTube was at the time, i.e. a young company with vast amounts of data and finding ourselves in management meetings discussing the potential impact of decision A or B on revenue, basket size, delivery lead time, etc. I wanted to try how selecting one, main, important metric would change these discussions and our performance of that metric, if at all.

There are very few decisions one can make as the leader of a young ecommerce business (or any business for that matter) that have a limited and isolated impact to one function or department only. Everything we do is intertwined with something else and have ripple effects across functions, departments and processes. Furthermore, we have made decision making in TOP MOT consensus based, i.e. everyone freely expresses their opinion and suggested solution and we jointly agree on a ?nal solution and resulting consequences. This teaches us solidarity and ?exibility as we may have to live with decisions that are not our favorite, but best for the company as a whole. This means that we sometime have back and forth discussions regarding a specific topic to ensure we make the best decision in light of what we know at the time and thus have a great environment in which we can try this out.

Our unifying metric, as many young businesses, was related to topline growth. More specifically: "Will it make our Gross Merchandise Value grow?"

After using this unifying metric during the last 6 weeks, our team managed to achieve:

- One of our highest GMV run since inception;

- Broke our daily order and daily GMV records;

- Much faster and more effective decision making in all meetings; and

- Much faster, clearer and more succinct KPI and OKR setting and evaluation.

In fast paced, data driven start up environments where it's easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis, selecting and using a single, unifying performance metric was greatly liberating and clarifying. It forced us to prioritize our most important goal for a certain period of time and focused everyone's efforts towards it. It might not be optimal to use for an extensive period of time, but I could highly recommend trying it out for a few weeks.