How to use KPIs in your Startup | Hacker News Reader

How to use KPIs in your Startup

ryancarson.com

11 pointsjschuur10 comments

If there ever was a certain way of killing morale in a startup it was by introducing KPIs and calling them KPIs.

I disagree. In a healthy startup, everyone wants to push towards the same goal and they welcome clarity and cohesion. We could've called them 'Buttercups'. The term doesn't matter - it's just an agreement of what the shared goal is.

Ryan - from what I've seen (we've recently started doing KPIs at our startup) - the more business-y people like them, and the more tech-y people hate them. To Sherman's point, their naming offends tech people - "KPI" sounds like it's meant to intentionally obfuscate, whereas "key metric" is the same number of syllables. Pretentious isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

I don't mean to say that they're not good - looking at yours, they seem very reasonable. We're introducing a Product team right now, over/with a dev team that's been otherwise self-reliant for the last two years, and there are growing pains with that process. As silly as it is, speaking everyone's language (not talking about KPI's or sending power points to devs, not sending Legal to GitHub to checkout your terms of service, etc) is important for buy-in.

That being said, yours is the first tech person's blog post about KPIs. I'll be sure to check back on it as we get our dashboard off the ground - thanks Ryan.

"KPI" is a common term that most people are aware of, so it's mostly about avoiding confusion.

Who understands "KPI" that wouldn't understand "metrics"?

It could well be - it's gained prominence in my company over the last 2 months, but I'd never heard of it before that. I actually googled it in a meeting with sales people, assuming it was a term native to the ad industry, and I laughed out loud when I read what it stood for. If it's been a common industry term for a few years, then maybe I'm at the "Late Majority" or "Laggards" part of the curve - though I suspect we're a little earlier than that.

It reminds me strongly of MVP - people that "get it" love it (I'm among them), and it changes the way that they think of things. However, it's buzz-word-y, and alienates those who don't. My point isn't that KPIs are a bad thing (or even a bad term), but there's an important subset of people who stop listening when you say it.

I hope that this works out well for you and your team, however when reading the post I couldn't think of anything else but measuring developer's performance by lines of code.

Thanks for sharing these. A few questions:

Do you track these on a rolling monthly basis or calendar months?

Why do you have social metrics like FB fans and Goolge +1s under Product?

To trace changes in these KPIs back to causes, you'll surely need to look at a finer timescale than a month. How do you do that?

These KPIs are on a monthly basis, but do you have anything more fine-grained to track KPIs weekly? Perhaps I'm getting too focused..

It's hard to affect most KPIs in 7 days. However, it really depends on what you're measuring. For instance, you could switch a lot of the User Growth KPIs to weekly instead of monthly.

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