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In my experience managers will look at the statistics and delegate discovering and solving of the why. In big companies statistics are gold (and very very simp
by adamio 15y ago
In my experience managers will look at the statistics and delegate discovering and solving of the why. In big companies statistics are gold (and very very simple) because the managers don't understand the why. It's a chain of delegation based on "Key Performance Indicators" that ultimately leads to the people who know how to discover & fix the problem. This bottom up approach may work in reactionary & manufacturing environments but it fails in most other areas. Startups mean the fixers have to self-manage.
- ironchef 15y agoAnother issue I've seen in the past is that management by statistics can lead to settling at local maxima. More extreme a/b tests can reveal said state.
- tryitnow 15y agoThis doesn't even work in a lot of big companies. The "KPIs" many managers see reveal very little. They have often been massaged to present a rosier picture than the reality. Or they may present information that just isn't very actionable. This problem is due to poor data management by companies, specifically, the data often require human intervention to turn into summary statistics (e.g. KPIs). Anytime there is a human being touching data several potential problems arise: 1) unintended mistakes, e.g. misspellings 2) bias, for example truncating "outliers" that disagrees with your desired message 3) failure to explore messy data that may contain more powerful messages than the clean data 4) failure to link data in one function to data in another function (e.g. linking operations data with financial data)