

How to use KPIs in your Startup - jschuur
http://ryancarson.com/post/28258737029/how-to-use-kpis-in-your-startup

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

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ryancarson
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.

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rhunter
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.

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

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rhunter
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.

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quicksilver03
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.

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revorad
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?

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lukethomas
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..

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ryancarson
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.

