Happy Friday!

I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a great break. I didn't send out my normal Friday email because I was driving back from North Carolina and just didn't have the energy.

Let's be honest, though, you probably had better things to do than read my newsletter the day after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is the subject of today's newsletter. Well, that and an offer I'll put at the bottom of the email. Reports came in that the amount of money spent on Black Friday was higher than ever. Some took this as a sign of a strong economy.

Then the other information came out that people actually bought less, but spent more on those fewer things. Which folks took as a sign that our economy isn't maybe as strong as we thought.

This isn't a political email, but rather one that I want to use as a cautionary tale about metrics, especially vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are metrics that tend to be easy to get to but poor indicators of whatever you care about. So in products, this could be the number of downloads, page loads, etc. These are easy numbers to get, but if you ran your business on how many times your site loaded, you can imagine how you might not stay in business for long.

Unfortunately, you don't always know a vanity metric is a vanity metric until after you try to use it to make a decision. It is at that moment you realize you don't know what is going on, no matter how good the number makes you feel.

So what can you do? Balance the metric!

Setting measures and metrics is a big topic, but one way I tend to look at metrics is in terms of balance. So if we have a metric like page loads, I would ask the question, "What might we accidentally give up, lose, or sacrifice for page loads?" This list provides my candidates for balancing metrics. I will then monitor one of these others to make sure the pursuit of page loads doesn't hurt other aspects of business.

Want a classic example? Velocity.

Generally speaking, velocity represents development speed and capacity to most folks in the industry. Everyone wants that number to go up. What might we lose in pursuit of speed? Quality. So you can balance velocity with a quality metric.

Now with these two, you have a stronger signal that the pursuit of speed isn't causing an unwelcome sacrifice somewhere else.

You might be thinking velocity and quality don't address business needs, and you're right. There are far better metrics to use, but it is easier to start these practices with what you have and what people actually use.

So, here's my question: can you think of a metric in your workplace that needs balancing?

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: What would black friday be without an offer? I'm giving away the chance for you to have me give a 1-hour keynote to your team or group. I can speak on exceptional engineering, product, agility, lean that don't suck, quality, and more. The first 3 to reply and claim a keynote win.