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Dion Almaer

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Startup

One Metric To Rule Them All!

August 11, 2018 Leave a Comment


People want focus! Move one metric! Up and to the right! Go non linear!

How do you focus an entire team or company? You just need to hold up One Metric To Rule Them All! I have heard this many times, and overheard a CEO talking about it just last week. I get it. Clarity is so much easier to rationalize and measure, so who wouldn’t rather have a black and white world?

The problem is that it is easy to go blind and start on a path that leads you to at best a local maxima, and most commonly to a rather bad spot, especially if you land on a vanity metric.

“What gets measured gets managed.” — Peter Drucker

While measuring is important, the key piece is making sure you are measuring the right things, and that you have a tension in your measurements. Take the time to have metrics that are in tension, or make sure that you put restrictions on the key metrics. Why?

Using the Levers

It is often easier than you think to force one metric. You often have multiple dials at your disposal, and you can point them at the metric at a detriment to the business. I learned this first hand in the world of eCommerce, where I was surprised to see how it was relatively easy to hit raw revenue numbers if you discounted profit. Your levers include pricing and buying traffic.

Vanity Metric Abuse

Input metrics can also be gamed. I recently saw someone who was measured on the number of people they were able to get to particular events. To juice the number, they were incented to get butts in seats with little regard for how qualified the people were. At some point they mentioned the fact that they even asked family to show up at times!

Quality vs. Quantity

To combat this, you have to balance quality vs. quantity. This is true in almost anything that you think of. Let’s take the number of people in prison. Surely we want less of them, right? The US has far too many people in the penal system, because it is ultimately unfair, as explained in this great book by Adam Benforado. We need to rethink policy and the incentive structures, and carefully balance the goal of having less people in prison, with the quality of people in there. In fact, the north star metric is a safe and fair society, and when you look at the problem through that lense, you broaden your view. For example, you remember that the system is meant to minimize offences, and isn’t there as a weapon of vengeance.

Ecosystem Views

This is why it is important to take an ecosystem view. I talked a little about this in my last post on the Web Ecosystem and how we view something as complex as the Web. The community needs to think of itself as regulators, looking to make changes that nudge things in the right direction. This broadens the view from “we make and improve our browser” (product) to “we do all we can to enable a healthy ecosystem, using all of the tools and investment options at our disposal”.

Short term vs. Long term

When you wear a regulator-type-hat, you are naturally thinking about the long term. This is important, as without this responsibility you are too tempted to get short term gains, which harm the long term. One of the root issues with climate change is the fact that manufacturing and the complex ecosystem didn’t have to factor the effects on the ecosystem into their market costs. This is what leads to the fact that a viable business can be made from flying water from Fiji around the world.

Add the fact that many workers have shorter stints in a role, or at a company, and you have to make sure that the incentive systems in place don’t force the short term. How does the performance review and promotion system think about work? Is your public company focused on the next quarters results for the market? Entropy is a strong force here to combat!

Segmentation and the long tail

It is important to spend time understanding the ecosystem you live in, and segmenting it correctly. Different ecosystems have different needs. The Web is naturally more long tail than other software ecosystems. The fact that everything is easily linked, mated with products such as Search that need to respond with an answer to many a niche query, force things in that direction. I personally love this about the Web, as it aligns the platform with allowing new incumbents and drives traffic to a greater variety of experiences.

Time to map it all out

So, take the time to really think through your ecosystem. First set north star output metrics for the ecosystem, then segment and learn what is happening, and finally have a strategy for what you want to change. From the strategy you can have the secondary metrics that can be leading indicators for the change that is coming (with ecosystems, often slower than you would like).

Make sure that you aren’t doing long term harm with your tactics. For example, with our love of “engagement”, it is easy to build viral systems that drive the wrong kind of engagement for our higher goals (not all engagement is equal). This is where your values come in (and often, strong founders) to make sure that you haven’t lost sight of the mission at hand.

This may be more work than driving ahead with that one metric to rule them all, but it’s worth it. And, there is even a “law” behind the danger, Goodhart’s Law, which Emily Freeman just brought top of mind:

I've had a few chats this week about measuring #devrel efficacy. I found a term for the thing we all talk about! pic.twitter.com/dpWlJR8HRL

— Emily Freeman (@editingemily) August 12, 2018


How about building a model for the lifetime value of developers for your developer product? Ian Barber has a great analysis that he posted today!

Platform? Patience

November 14, 2017 Leave a Comment


“We are a platform company” — VC pitch

Whenever I hear this utterance I get curious to understand what this person thinks that means. Sometimes it ends up being related to wanting to be a platform company, but that is besides the point. If you really do end up being a platform company, then one key aspect of a great one is patience.

If you are fortunate enough to grow a business that has success, you now have producers and consumers working with you (I will switch to developers and users because I think about developer platforms :). Congrats! Just one small thing though….. it may start to feel like you are driving a boat vs. racing a Ferrari, and you need to account for that.

Hopefully you got into this situation carefully and have plans for keeping momentum and moving the ecosystem.

I once got stuck in a boat off of the Florida Keys. Everyone had forgotten that it was a full moon, and the tide came out quickly. This meant that we had a boat sitting on shale, and we had to slowly push it as fast as we could to catch up to the water.

The tides are always moving in your business too, and you need to make sure that you have a way to keep moving ahead of them. You could also argue that your role as a platform is to be the ocean, and thus you need to keep the tide moving, nudging the boats in the right direction.

To do this nudging correctly you need to be able to:

Communicate the vision of the platform

Where are you going? Why?

Keep the vision updated and get into the rhythm of “we are going over there!”, “remember when we said we were going over there? that time is coming!”, “we have made the change so you can go there, but haven’t broken you yet, but really…. time is running out!”, “ok, it’s really painful for you to not have made this change…. the warning signs are flashing”, “done.”

Have a connection to developers

How well connected are you to your developers. If you have an important message to get out to them, how many of them get it? Far too often a platform is shooting out UDP messages that get missed, and developers don’t even have the information to do the right thing for them and our users.

This can be really tricky. We have many ways to communicate, and most of them are lossy in some way, or don’t reach the right people on the other end. You can broadcast to email, or you can put messages in consoles, but do they reach a general “admin” account?

Knowing that you have a lossy protocol is important, and puts the burden on you to re-try across the board, and capture when there has been real action. There are plenty of basics to get right such as having the same messages reach the various touch points. E.g. can the central console messages reach developers in the tooling that they live in each and every day? Do the various tools even get the same message across? Often the answer is…. sub-optimal.

Have a connection to users

Do you have good control over the platform that the user actually has? Can you update it and secure it? Just as the connection to developers is key, so is this.

By moving the developers you keep upgrading the experience for users.

By moving the users you give reason for developers to prioritize.

By moving them both, everyone progresses, hopefully leading to much success for all

The patience part

Once you have a plan on how to keep momentum, you still need to acknowledge that you will probably have to be patient. Your platform priorities may not always totally align with those of developers and users.

With both, there are incremental updates which can work nicely (smaller changes) unless they are too small to prioritize.

With larger efforts you are reaching a new level, and you may find yourself running into a natural cycle. E.g. it’s been a few years and there is enough value to be had that the product team is ready to rewrite a large part of the system, giving them a chance to jump to the next level.

Now, building the next generation of primitives (and tools and ….) takes a long time.

A great example of this is the recent upgrade of web primitives. Alex Russell gave a talk on the multi-year journey, which is a great example of looking to the future and plotting all of the dots that will get you to a new location whilst bringing incremental value along the way.

It is fascinating to think back to some of the individual items and how the community has gone from “nah we don’t need that” to “man, it is so much more fun to build on the Web now with these primitives!” — I am looking at your ES2015!.

The larger you get as a platform, the more wrinkles you get, and you run into Hyrum’s Law:

“With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract, all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.” — Hyrum

This is where you can run into the feeling of momentum slowing, but you have to press on.

Sometimes this slowness is partially an issue of perception. When you are small you can see big movements in percentage terms, and you get excited (and ignore the small base). When larger the percentages can feel smaller, but the absolute change can be massive. A momentum change for a huge mass is a huge change, but it may not feel it, and there is always so much that you want to do.

We see perception issues with new platforms too. We humans are awful eye witnesses, and we are dreadful and remembering time periods. When a new computing model pops up, we forgot how long the last one took to really take and we want instant success. We see how obvious it is “we knew this would happen, because Star Trek!” and rush. Instead we need to remember that it takes time to truly bake in something new, and instead of rushing for “fake” adoption we need to nail use cases that add true value and build from there.

We also like to simplify and think in linear terms. Platform A begets Platform B begets Platform C. In reality platforms often evolve and, importantly, work together. This means that new paradigms are often accessories and amplifiers of current platforms….. and that is OK! Having and vs. or isn’t a bad thing.

Have the vision, have communication in place, measure the right thing, and be patient.

Republicans, The Lottery, and Apps

February 22, 2016 Leave a Comment

Without attempting to be too political, I have always been a touch confused at the working class folk who are strong supporters of the current Republican ideology. It seems pretty clear that the fiscal policy favors the rich, as is evidenced by the current discussion on income inequality (although you can argue that the democrats don’t also shoulder the blame!).

A simple view could be one of:

a) “I hate taxes. The government wastes that money so I shouldn’t have to give them anything to waste!”

b) “One day the American Dream ™ will come my way, and then it will be in my favor!”

I won’t bother to discuss a), although I am a fan of the fact that we have shared infrastructure. The attitude shared in b) is the one that relates to the rest of this discussion.

It also ties into the lottery system, and how we manage to fund programs by using the law of large numbers. If you get a lot of people to pay a couple bucks that adds up big with enough of a population but in theory doesn’t have a large effect on them. Huh, that isn’t all bad. What if we took the change from every purchase and also donated it. That scale could do so much good! However, isn’t that what taxes is for? Isn’t that what people seem to hate so much? What have taxes ever done for me!!!! (Other than pave society?)

The lottery sells hope. It is actually the lack of the american dream that paradoxically calls to many. Deep down you know that you are fighting an uphill battle to earn these riches, so you reach for luck instead. It is easy to poke fun and say that the lottery is a tax for those who are bad at Math, but it isn’t our place to judge. When you plan a vacation, you often get more joy from the build up and anticipation, so maybe some of this helps here.

Bring in the Apps

Building an app, getting it into the app store, and hoping for the customers to come raining in sure feels like a lottery these days doesn’t it? When a new platform comes along there is the rush to the gold. You can often create something new and get lucky, or you can copy history and make money selling tools and infrastructure to the miners.

At this point there is already an app for that, and if there isn’t you need to fight for mindshare in a store with masses of choices.

When creating your lovely application it sits proudly on your homescreen. This is where you envision it on a large number of users phones. This is the pride of place for the applications that need repeat engagement and access. Does your application really warrant that?

I was working with a friend who has a fantastic new group event service. It was a great example of something that it useful, but an app may not be needed. The event organizer may want the access and the rich functionality. The group they run may be an important part of their lives. But for the other members of the group? It may not be as important.

That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t want to get notified when something important changed for their group. It doesn’t mean that if they enter the experience it should only be able to tell them basic info if they have a good internet connection.

This is why I am excited for progressive web apps. I picture a world where this application can get a broad reach and also get the engagement capabilities it needs.

You always need some luck when you come up with a new business or service. To give yourself a chance for it to grow and flourish it may be wise to not have to hit the homerun of the homescreen. Allow your business to work through frictionless links, A/B test without large delays, and don’t waste time and resource porting an experience multiple times.

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The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.

Dion Almaer

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