I think this is very clever. There is a lesson in doing something so simple, as opposed to our engineering reflex to over-engineer everything. My first exposur

I think this is very clever. There is a lesson in doing something so simple, as opposed to our engineering reflex to over-engineer everything. My first exposure to an effective business metric was my first consulting gig which was at Domino's Pizza HQ. Tom Monaghan was convinced that shorter delivery times led to increased sales. He had been unable to convince the franchisees of this, so he started a "Service and Delivery" program. Each month, secret shoppers would order pizza two different times, record the delivery time (starting when they hung up the phone) and rate the quality of the service. I wrote the program to crunch the numbers, sorting by sales, and sorting by delivery time. The two lists had a very high correlation. He published these lists each month in a company newsletter. When I started the process, the delivery time was like 34 minutes companywide, and a year later, the time had been reduced to 28 minutes average. The sales rankings validated his intuition. (The program had to be discontinued, after there was a lawsuit relating to a death caused in an auto accident involving a pizza delivery driver.) So the lesson here for us engineering types is, as patio11 says, is to find a way to do business value in what you are about to build.