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Thank you! Your post hit really hard, because a) Sole focus of my team IS MRR. b) I wrote something very similar. Sorry if my comment is a little maendering,
by artpi 6y ago
Thank you!
Your post hit really hard, because a) Sole focus of my team IS MRR. b) I wrote something very similar.
Sorry if my comment is a little maendering, I am a dad as of 7 days and what they tell you about sleep is no joke.
I want to plug in one of the less famous Drucker quotes:
> Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work.
It's true that "What gets measured gets managed" by the converse is also true - if you focus on one metric only, the rest will fall into disarray.
It's good to keep your eyes at the gauges when you are flying, but just as the map is not the territory, the measurement is not the real thing.
People love metrics, because they give them an illusion of control over a complicated, real world, messy reality. The core of the problem is unfortunately human bias to simplify. We as a wider tech community are contributing a bit introducing yet-another-dashboard.
But as you rightly point, the metrics people pick are the ones that are easiest to measure. NOT the ones worth measuring. In fact I published a post quite similar to yours: https://piszek.com/2019/11/24/metrics/ https://piszek.com/2019/11/24/metrics/
To broaden the theme, I would even argue that Taleb is complaining about roughly a similar set of problems: Gaussian curve is an oversimplification as well and has caused a lot of suffering when misapplied.
Despite all of these caveats, there is a benefit to having a focus (like MRR you are mentioning). Having a singular focus can be transformative and can make one developer more effective than 30-people team with no real direction.
In that sense, there is benefit to metrics. As with all real-world things, I think the only solution is a dynamic equilibrium, where you change from one approach to the other to cover your bases.
As I wrote in the beginning of this comment, the Team I Lead (we build simple ecommerce tools) was tasked with maximizing MRR and the side-effect of having that focus was that we ignored the one-off sales features that our customers wanted desperately.