Part One: Strategy · Deciding what to build
Features shipped and time spent are easy to count and pleasant to report. Counting them rewards the company for being busy and the product for holding people longer than they wanted.
Two kinds of number fall out of any tool for free. One is output: features shipped, tickets closed, the share of the plan that is done. The other is attention: visits, minutes, daily opens. Both go up. Neither says whether anyone was helped.
The trouble starts when someone is judged by one of them. A team measured on features shipped will ship features. A manager measured on daily opens will make the product louder, and a product that takes longer to do the same thing scores better on time spent. A number that becomes a target stops telling the truth.
People need something to look at this week, and some honest measures are slow. So choose a few that rise only when a person gets what they came for. How many newcomers reach a first real result, which moves within days. How many get from the start of a task to its end. How many come back because they have more of their own work to do, which takes months. For a booking tool, that means appointments kept. For a deploy tool, releases that did not have to be undone.
Where time spent is the point, as in music, video and games, count whether people got what they came for: the album played through, the level finished. Some of this cannot be counted, and you have to go and ask.
Larry Page said in 2004 that Google wanted to get people out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. That was the measure then: a search engine that held people longer was a worse one.
Therefore:
Choose measures that rise only when a person gets what they came for: the first result reached, the task finished, the return made for their own reasons. Treat features shipped and extra time spent as costs.
In practice. Take the main number on your dashboard and ask: could this go up while customers are worse off? If it could, put a number beside it that could not. You can do this even when the dashboard is not yours.
Goes with. The right measures come from THE PROGRESS THEY WANT (2). Two of them are named by FIRST USEFUL RESULT IN MINUTES (34) and THE SECOND VISIT (39).
Source: Larry Page, interview in Playboy, September 2004.