Uncommon metrics that say a lot about your company
I recently came across this inquiry on Twitter:
The variety of answers are amazing:
I can think of a bunch more:
Ratio of male speaking time to female speaking time
Ratio of “junior” speaking time to “senior” speaking time
Ratio of intent shared to permission asked
# of internal experiments attempted in a month
Obviously, some of these metrics are tough to track, but it’s a wonderful thought exercise.
It got me thinking: if we intuitively know the indicators of a customer-focused, healthy, empowered, diverse, and equitable company, what’s stopping us from tracking them?
We usually measure for engagement, retention, and monetization
To help us understand why we don’t usually track these metrics, it’s helpful to understand what we do track.
If you’re a focused product company, you’ll likely track three types of metrics:
Retention. A common example of this is daily/monthly active users.
Engagement. Some metric that captures how engaged your active users are.
Monetization. Revenue, cost of goods sold, and margin.
The kind of metrics you use for retention, engagement, and monetization vary depending on your industry, product, and stage, but generally, you want some assembly of these three. And honestly, it’s important to get these metrics up first. How will you know how your business is doing? How will you know if users are getting value out of your product?
Not many companies have retention, engagement, and monetization metrics in place that anyone in their company can access. In companies I’ve consulted with, they’re either too light or too heavy on metrics. So it’s worth acknowledging that it takes some effort for companies to get these metrics in place first, making our uncommon metrics above less of a priority to track.
However, just because it’s easy for companies to deprioritize metrics around customer-centricity, empowerment, diversity, compensation fairness, and work-life balance doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t track these metrics at all.
Tracking metrics on the individual level
Let’s shift gears for a bit. I (somewhat maniacally) keep a personal metrics spreadsheet. I’ve kept it since February 2016, and update it every week during my weekly review.
I’ve added, edited, and deleted these metrics over the years to adapt to my current goals. But the themes of the metrics were consistent: finances, fitness, health, writing, reading, sleeping.
I don’t do any fancypants analysis with the data here, but it could be cool to explore questions like:
Are weeks where I sleep well correlated with weeks I write a lot?
Are weeks where I exercise 3+ times a week correlated with weeks I sleep well?
I think it’s good I don’t do any fancy analyses on these, though. Because the point of this sheet is to give me a feedback loop on how I’m doing in areas that are important to me.
What if we tracked these metrics every week?
Back to organizations.
A team I’ve coached in the past chose # of escalations in the past week as a metric to track in their weekly meetings. This team was trying to reduce the number of times they escalate a decision to their manager. They—the leader and the team—wanted to get better at empowering their team, despite it feeling uncomfortable initially.
So the plan was: everyone tallied up the number of times they would escalate a decision to their manager. We’d add everyone’s tallies up every week and look at it as a team in our weekly meeting. # of escalations in the past week became our weekly metric.
Sometimes total escalations were high. Other times it was low. When we saw the number decrease, we celebrated. When we saw the number increase, we had the hard conversation and addressed any elephants in the room. Tracking this metric gradually helped the team make more decisions without their manager being involved.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity to bring this practice to your team. Pick 3-5 metrics that a) have to do with something your company cares about (diversity, customer-centricity, empowerment, compensation fairness), and b) aren’t already being tracked. Don’t track more than 5, as this will help you focus. Then, just track it on some tool that everyone has access to. Review the metric in your weekly meeting. And be open to what you find out.