So, do you prefer a team focused on building the best possible product or a team focused on numbers to meet a contract?
Mistake 2: Placing a goal on an indicator
To understand this mistake, let’s look at the difference between a goal and an indicator. Here are their definitions:
A goal is a purpose or goal that we have set for ourselves and that must be achieved.
An indicator is an evaluation and decision-making tool, developed from a measurable or appreciable element allowing the evolution of a process to be considered in relation to a reference.
The order of creating these two things to properly serve a product should therefore be:
Define the goals we want to achieve with our product.
Define indicators on these objectives to help us assess whether we are progressing in the right direction or not.
However, sometimes the opposite is done, namely:
Ask yourself what indicators to create to monitor our product.
Define a goal to achieve for each of these indicators to consider a situation acceptable.
The problem here is that now the indicator becomes the target to be achieved. It will therefore absorb the attention of the teams at the expense of the real objective of the product . In addition, this invites the observer to treat each indicator as a unit (we must all turn them "green"). Thus, if an indicator is considered to be achieved, this could suggest that everything is fine without further questioning the situation. However, an isolated indicator rarely gives enough information to assess an overall situation.
“When a measure becomes an objective, it ceases to be a good measure” - Goodhart's Law
Conversely, if we first define the objective we wish to achieve, and then find the indicators to tell us whether our choices are bringing us closer to our goal, then we maintain this critical mind about our progress.
? Rather than putting a completion goal on a metric, it would make more sense to set up sweden telegram data attention thresholds ” to alert us when a state of our product may become critical. This would encourage discussion around these thresholds, the interpretation of these numbers, and the severity of the alert in relation to our product goal.
Mistake 3: Using metrics to assess individual performance / compare performance between teams
Here we are not talking about the indicator itself, but about a condition for our indicators to be useful.
To do this, people need to adhere to these indicators , be transparent and honestly maintain our indicators. It is therefore essential that there is goodwill around these indicators and that our organization advocates the right to make mistakes.
" The more a quantitative social indicator is used as an aid to social policy decisions, the more likely it is that indicator will be manipulated and act as a distorting factor, thereby distorting the social processes it is designed to monitor." - Campbell's Law