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Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz say, in their excellent book Lean Analytics: “A good metric is comparative. Being able to compare a metric to other time periods, groups of users, or competitors helps you understand which way things are moving. Increased conversion from last week” is more meaningful than “2% conversion.” A good metric is understandable. If people can’t remember it and discuss it, it’s much harder to turn a change in the data into a change in the culture. A good metric is a ratio or a rate. Accountants and financial analysts have several ratios they look at to understand, at a glance, the fundamental health of a company. You need some, too… . A good metric changes the way you behave. This is by far the most important criterion for a metric: what will you do differently based on changes in the metric?”
Radical Focus SECOND EDITION
Christina Wodtke
Don’t Jump Straight to Your Conclusions When preparing for a meeting with stakeholders, we tend to focus on our conclusions—our roadmap, our release plan, our prioritized backlog. More often than not, this is exactly what our stakeholders are asking us to share. Even in companies that espouse a focus on outcomes, we still tend to spend most of our time talking about outputs. The challenge with this approach is that our stakeholders often have their own conclusions. It’s easy to have an opinion about outputs. We all have our own preferences about how a product or service should work. When we anchor the conversation in the solution space, we encourage our stakeholders to share their own preferences. However, these preferences aren’t always grounded in good discovery. After all, it’s our job to do discovery, not our stakeholders’.
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
Nordstrom is, in the words of strategist Christina Wodtke, “experimenting with their customers, not on their customers.”
Sense and Respond
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
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