Dora
Don’t be data-driven; be data-informed.
Being data-driven means that you make a decision upon the data you’ve gathered and measured. Being data-informed means that you make a decision and nudge that decision with your metrics as input. Metrics are imperfect, they should be meaningful your Build, measure, learn loop should drive an optimization in your core metrics.
Metrics can be harmful, and it’s not always obvious or easy to spot when they’re actually harmful.
When your metrics are misaligned, they hijack your focus and you’ll drift away from your actual goals. Whilst vanity metrics can shatter your confidence and demotivate you or give you false confidence and make you take risky bets. Even if you’re measuring the correct thing, it might still be hard as you can only measure something quantifiable. Even when you’re doing all things correct, there still might be unforeseen side effects by optimizing for certain metrics, you are what you measure and optimize towards.
You can try to curb this by cutting metrics during the decision making process, while still collecting for historical purposes and incorporate customer feedback, when you cannot fully quantify using automated measurements.