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Book recommendation: Measure what matters
- oh_sigh 8y agoSequel: You can't miss what you can't measure.
- edpichler 8y agoI am using OKRs with a small team, and the results are being very good. Basically it´s a very clear communication tool. When used correctly, the team simply knows the measurable things company expect of them. OKR´s helps on "Mastery", one of the three pillars of the book "Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us". This book, "Measure What Matters", is my next reading. Thank you HN.
- godelmachine 8y agoAre you talking about "Mastery" by Robert Greene?
- edpichler 8y agoNo, mastery of the "Drive" book. Basically, with measurable results, people tends to "mastery" a job.
- sixhobbits 8y agoI recently finished Drive and loved it,and I'm also working with a small team where we recently implemented OKRs. Now working through "Punished by Rewards", and also really enjoyed Andy Grove's "High Output Management" (in spite of the title) and the original "Flow" book, in spite of its esoteric style. Would love to hear what else you've read and enjoyed in this area.
- edpichler 8y agoNice your books recommendation, thank you. It seems we are facing similar challenges. I will save them on my personal kanban to read them later. I recently finished Traction, that was very useful to me, I discovered I was so ignorant that I was blind about the marketing area of my product. Also, there is a interesting PDF, may you can found useful, if you need to avail other peoples work: https://www.dropbox.com/s/79v5vmprkz7dpb9/Nobody%20gets%20credit%20for%20what%20never%20happened.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/79v5vmprkz7dpb9/Nobody%20gets%20cr...
- lefstathiou 8y agoI’ve been spending a lot of time on this and really found the book Traction useful. Thesis is that every role has to have some clearly defined objective measurables that can indicate to the employee and manager success. I have not been able to apply it to our developers and engineers but it has been extremely effective in sales (sales development, management and sales ops). I know within two weeks if a candidate is on track, above or below and can predict growth quite easily and can immediately rehabilitate the situation.
- vowelless 8y agoBill Gates has talked about this general concept before. Here is one of his Annual Letters titled " Accelerating Impact through Measurement": https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Why-I-Write-an-Annual-Letter https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Why-I-Write-an-A...
- justherefortart 8y agoI love Bill Gates but I've never heard Microsoft's management to be anything other than terrible. Stack ranking which they used for god only knows how long is a joke. It makes people focus more on the game and politics than doing a good job.
- jonknee 8y agoHe hasn't been in charge of Microsoft for almost 20 years and stack ranking was actually introduced by Ballmer.
- justherefortart 8y agoFair enough, but based on the biographies and books I've read about the first decade+ of Microsoft, treating employees like shit was pretty common. Hell, there's a reason Paul Allen left and never returned (Balmer and Gates talking about getting his shares back when he was diagnosed with cancer.)
- pinewurst 8y agoAnother data point is anyone who’s familiar with the workings of the Gates Foundation knows it’s a snakepit. Yes, Bill and Melinda mean well and it’s far from Zuck’s scam foundation, but it’s hardly an efficient organization.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoTerrible enough to make it one of the most valuable companies in the world :)
- tanderson92 8y agoThe story is tragically ironic given the Gates Foundation history with the so-called "Small Schools Myth": https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th... http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38282806/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38282806/ns/business-bloomberg_bus...
- gowld 8y agoI wonder how much Gates was blinded by bias -- Gates himself attended a small... expensive, private school.
- t3h2mas 8y agoI'm listening to "Thinking Fast and Slow" right now. In it, the author talks about Gates school study, and others, as well as bias. The author claims that small sample sets always produce the most extreme results, and while statisticians know this, measurements continue to happen using smaller data sets. The author also claims that you could find data to support smaller schools being worse than larger ones due to the same issue. Great book. It leaves me questioning the 'why' behind everything I think I know.
- iooi 8y agoCareful with drawing too many conclusions from that book. Your take away is pretty ironic, considering that was Kahneman's problem: "I placed too much faith in underpowered studies" [1] [1] https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
- tylerhou 8y agoChapter 4 contained most of the errors on priming; the rest of the book is still solid.
- beambot 8y agoToo often, OKRs seem to be tied to quarterly or bi-annual peer reviews. I find that cadence limiting -- especially in a fast-paced or small team. A compelling alternative is SMART goals, which force you to be concrete about the OKR goals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria SMART is an acronym: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. You can adjust the timing to be a bi-weekly sprint, monthly, etc. YMMV.
- baldeagle 8y agoBased on the except, it sounds like the Key Result needs to be SMART, but the Objective should be more inspirational / visionary.
- btian 8y agoIf you read Doerr's book, he specifically said OKRs should not be tied to performance reviews, compensation, and promotion. Also, OKRs should be aspirational.
- gowld 8y agoSMART isn't quite an alternative to OKRs, it's a complement -- SMART is a good guideline for defining KRs (or any goals)
- tomaha 8y agoThe problem is to determine what matters. It sounds nice but especially at the bigger companies which measure pretty much everything today it's one of the reasons that there is no creativity. It optimizes short-term goals (and most of the time focus on money/engagement) and discourages long-term goals or riskier approaches. IMO that's because innovative companies turn into optimized earning machines but produce little useful.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago> "The problem is to determine what matters." Spot on. Problem solving is relatively easy, the hard part is problem identification. As a rule of thumb, The Five Whys is a wonderfully simple (but effective) tool for problem identification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
- Terretta 8y agoExactly. Trivial example: what matters, low costs, or effectiveness? If Congress keeps telling its Generals to cut costs for the army, eventually the Generals will surplus all the equipment and send all the troops home. At this point the army is certainly lower cost, but might not be much use defending Capitol Hill.
- zippitydoodah68 8y agoBill Gates: started as programmer ended as laughingstock.
- dyoo1979 8y agoIf by "laughingstock", you mean of the millions of lives that his foundation has saved from infant mortality, thus giving those folks the opportunity to smile and laugh, then I agree with that sentiment.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoKind of with you here. And Paul Allen is a keeping busy [to put it lightly] as well. (Quincy Jones even said he was the only white guy he's met who can play guitar at all. That's high praise)
- michaelcampbell 8y agoOr low praise of Quincy Jones, because this sounds like racist douchebaggery.
- jonknee 8y agoIf we could be so lucky to have a lot more "laughingstocks" like Bill Gates.
- randcraw 8y agoI think the challenge here is whether Gates should be offering advice on management, as opposed to business. The rise of Microsoft (prior to Ballmer) was famously due less to Gates' skills as a people / organizational manager than to 1) the company's timely dominance of the desktop and 2) expansion of that dominance into monopoly. As such, why should Gates' endorsement on topics of management or leadership deserve undue attention now?
- sctb 8y agoPlease don't break the guidelines by posting unsubstantively like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tootie 8y agoI heard the term OKR for the first time earlier this week. I'd always used the term KPI (key performance indicator).
- erikstarck 8y agoSimilar but not the same. A KPI is backward looking/lagging while an OKR should crystalize an ambition and look forward.
- wenc 8y agoManagement techniques come and go, but at the core of management is an understanding of systems/process and of human behavior. A really good book on management is Andy Grove's "High Output Management" [1], which to me strikes a good balance. It's a fairly popular book in SV and probably a known quantity to most HN readers. It's also notable in that it wasn't written by some management guru or business prof who's never managed anyone in their lives (i.e. Drucker), but instead drawn from the experiences of a CEO of a significant company (Intel). The blue-collar equivalent is Plain Talk by F. Ken Iverson, former CEO of NuCor Steel. [2] (not the author of APL -- that's Ken E. Iverson :) [1] TLDR https://medium.com/@iantien/top-takeaways-from-andy-grove-s-high-output-management-2e0ecfb1ea63 https://medium.com/@iantien/top-takeaways-from-andy-grove-s-... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1450374.Plain_Talk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1450374.Plain_Talk
- rossdavidh 8y ago"What gets measured gets improved". Which really means, "what doesn't get measured, will be traded off for what does".
- bluGill 8y agoMore importantly make sure you are measuring what really matters and not a proxy. I shut down our code coverage builds some years ago when I realized management was using that as a measure - the potential negatives from measuring that is far worse than any possible gain from an engineering improving anything. The measure is still useful, but until I can be convinced it won't be abused I won't measure it.
- ehsanu1 8y agoThey were using it as a measure of what exactly? I'm having a hard time seeing how it can be interpreted in a way that's a net negative.
- rhacker 8y agoI've seen teams trying to get bonus points for patching thousands of files with errors. All this was done instead of innovating or writing a better module in a more succinct language that tackles the problem directly. I'd rather see employees finding ways to make sure those errors and infractions can't happen - often requiring different programming languages and tools - instead of just patching the code.
- vanderZwan 8y agoI assume the book is supposed to tell me what matters, because based the blog sounds like the idea is to decide what matters and measure that. Well, maybe you have the wrong idea on what matters, and even if you do have the right idea, you may have the wrong idea on how to measure it. And even if you do have the right idea on how to measure it, you need to interpret it, put it into context. So many turns at which this can go wrong. If the book doesn't give some really good explanations for these things, it is akin to telling someone to eat healthy: I don't need to be told to eat less sugar, saturated fats, and more leafy greens. Actually implementing that diet in a way that I can keep up permanently is trickier than one might suspect, intuitions tend to be way off. Good advice would actually help me with that.
- rb808 8y agoHas anyone actually read this and liked it? Its a recommendation I'd normally follow but sounds like just another MBA class.
- cpeterso 8y agoI read the book and it is OK. It provides some history behind OKRs but I don't feel it is a practical reference for using OKRs. There are better resources online. I like this introduction to OKRs: https://medium.com/startup-tools/okrs-5afdc298bc28 https://medium.com/startup-tools/okrs-5afdc298bc28 And Google's re:Work site as a practical reference: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/introduction/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/ste...
- gowld 8y agoIt's a pop business book. You can get the info you need in 1 page (that's how most people learn how to do OKRs on the job), to you can read 200 pages of fluff that mostly serves as PR for the named parties.
- neves 8y agoI've worked in a companies where everybody knows what matters, but everybody decided do measure what was easy to measure. So everybody optimized for make points in what is easy to measure. A lot of times it was counterproductive.
- tacostakohashi 8y agoI still see this thing of expertise being overvalued in many organizations, and it's completely toxic. I find it's more common and successful private companies, but it can happen at public companies too. Typically, you get people that joined 10+ years ago, they implemented certain key systems / features when the company was small, nimble, and not too many actual customers to deal with. They probably worked long and hard to make that happen, probably largely without interfere Then, the company / product is successful, they promoted, have a kids, and end up being a full-time "expert" who writes emails and has opinions on present-day implementation details and changes, but is nowhere to be found when it comes to actually implementing anything or dealing with practical, day-to-day problems. Meanwhile, the more junior, recent joiners who are doing all those things get no say in the direction of what they're working on, and eventually leave to be replaced by the next batch of new joiners.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"has opinions on present-day implementation details and changes, but is nowhere to be found when it comes to actually implementing anything or dealing with practical, day-to-day problems." I see that a lot in my company. These guys basically have stopped learning and give advice based on what they did years ago. Only a selected few keep evolving. In some areas I am at risk to also become the resident expert. I wish I could just hand it off to someone else but what do you do yourself then?
- eggpy 8y agoYou tell your boss(es) about your concerns and onboard some new people, and you do something new. Either within the company; find a team that needs people or try to pioneer a new app, or change companies. Or accept being the expert and enjoy a promotion!
- maxxxxx 8y agoI don't know where you work and what area but this seems a little optimistic.
- valeg 8y agoI recommend also "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Z. Muller [1] for a balance. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36644895-the-tyranny-of-metrics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36644895-the-tyranny-of-...
- kuwze 8y agoCould someone please help me? I read an article a while ago about how someone in the gates foundation was using bayesdb/bayeslite to evaluate risks of investments. I have tried every search I can think of on hn.algolia.com but it eludes me.
- Double_Org 8y agoI worked at a consulting firm that sells this sort of philosophy. A big part of my job was explaining basic concepts from statistics and measurement to MBA types. A big problem with quantitative management approaches is that the people who are in charge of implementing them have weak math/statistics ability.
- nappy-doo 8y agoI used OKRs at Google for years, and I love them. I have never really thought to apply them to my personal life, but I remember people at Google having personal OKRs they published. Having read this, and thought about it outside the work environment, I think I might do the same in my life.
- arikr 8y agoTo anyone who reads "Measure What Matters," I strongly recommend as an additional book "How to Measure Anything" - I think it'll be really useful in enabling people to measure things that they may have previously assumed to be immeasurable, which means that these things can then be better optimized for and improved.
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- iamleppert 8y agoIntel has been on the decline for years now. They have tried to innovate new product lines and have mostly failed in almost everything they have tried to do. They are invisible in the mobile space, and soon even Apple won’t be using them in their products. They failed completely in IOT (Edison), still don’t have a 1:1 competitor with NVidia, and are going to miss out on the self-driving car revolution. They don’t really have any kind of Cloud or software business. Basically they’ve been riding on x86 and that gravy train is showing it’s age. They have recently been doing some cool things with drones, but I’m not sure that’s going to last and I fully expect it to fail eventually. Operational style management is important when you have a product that needs to be tuned and improved incrementally. But that same style of management is ill-suited and emotionally bankrupt for creative types who are the source and inspiration of the product vision in the first place and it shows in Intel’s floundering roadmap. One size fits all problem management and single minded solutions do not work. A process is a tool but not a replacement for empathy nor thinking.
- aventrix 8y agoWith regard to the self-driving car revolution, last year Intel purchased Mobileye. Just today it was announced that they closed a deal to include their hardware/software in 8+ million cars. So don't count them out yet. Not to discount any of your other points, which seem quite on point. Apple surely has been itching to replace them with their A series chips.
- LaundroMat 8y agoToo large a focus on measuring can turn into only valuing what's measurable. Beware the McNamara fallacy [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy