Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not.

Measure What Matters

John Doerr

A project begins with a vision that is, at best, a vague image of the glorious thing the project will become. Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested, and detailed that we can be confident we have a reliable road map of the way forward. Most planning is done with computers, paper, and physical models, meaning that planning is relatively cheap and safe. Barring other time pressures, it’s fine for planning to be slow. Delivery is another matter. Delivery is when serious money is spent and the project becomes vulnerable as a consequence.

How Big Things Get Done

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

The North Star Metric: Delivering high value to your market is not just a matter of altruism; it’s genuinely the best thing you can do for your business. It’s far easier to acquire and retain customers with high-value products, you can charge more for them, and they keep competitors at bay. Many modern product companies understand this and consider growing value-to-customer their most important goal. That’s where the North Star Metric comes in. A North Star Metric (NSM) is a number that sums up the core value we deliver to the market. In the words of growth expert Sean Ellis, it’s your value footprint.

Evidence-Guided

Itamar Gilad

...catch up on these, and many more highlights