Hi, we're Jon and Rashmi, and we're here to talk about bulding a metrics-driven organizationI'm sure you guys have been hearing a lot about metrics in this class so far. Am I right? We're going to be talking about how to get a whole company oriented around numbers."can't manage what you don't measure" is one of the oldest management cliches in the book. But … Founders emphaized too much. TEAM is what matters.
. But it's likely that a startup won't start out being metrics oriented. The initial rush of a startup is often about getting v1 of the initial vision of the product out the door. Initial product development is so hard that it's hard to focus on anything else. So at least for us, we came to metrics over time and we had to re-orient our organization around metrics.
Metrics as way to manage remote team
We had cake every time we hit a new 100k unique visitors. This meant we were getting cake ALL THE TIME. It got a little unhealthy. But was good team-building, communication of the goal and our progress towards it.
Technology part is hard (crunching big data) UI design is hard (data visualization design) Instrumenting the app is hard(ish).
No one wanted to work on metrics dashboard People used to working on live site, fast feedback loop. Metrics feels like boring internal work, like busywork
People DON’T like being accountable to what users do when they land on the page. Can feel unfair (I did my part, why won’t the users cooperate?)
Expectations for web apps have risen dramatically. The UI of an internal tool is going to be fugly and slow. People (yes, even founders) will bounce off a crap user interface now, even if it contains information that would help them do their job better.
Vanilla analytics are based on URLs. You almost certainly don’t care about behovior on individual URLs. You care about TEMPLATES. Google Analytics events lets you create categories and events within categories. Someone (usually non-technical) needs to own the names that get associated with each event, it can quickly get confusing otherwise. This is a classic product manager task.
N things we are balancing (slides viewed, sharing activity, ad clicking) Each comes at expense of other (engagement vs virality)
Need to itereate on metrics, and need to refactor / cut out junk in your metrics as well. Otherwise you’ll drown in numbers.
Response time for dynamic pages (within cluster) Response time (within cluster) Response time for downloading html (in browser) Response time for downloading and rendering all assets (in browser)