David Ingledow

There is a popular Apple Pie Position, which goes: “If you don’t measure it, you cannot improve it” This belief is often harmful on early-stage teams. This is more accurate: “If you don’t measure it, you cannot prove to some people that you improved it” Impact vs. Optics Implications: 1) You need leaders who have good taste. Without good taste, everything becomes an exercise to “prove it conclusively”, which slows teams down 2) As an org grows, it becomes increasingly hard to hire / retain enough people with good taste. Plus, because optics are now more important in such orgs, people end up having to do all sorts of useless work to prove the unprovable 3) Such orgs can maintain (and hopefully grow) existing mature products (because mature products lend themselves well to management by extensive measurement). But these orgs struggle to produce new products and make them successful. These orgs tend to be uninspiring and, for some people, boring 4) When you go from such an org to a smaller team or company, you must adjust your approach. If you yourself don’t have good taste, you must first build awareness of that and hire / listen to people who do have good taste 5) In all cases, understand that there is a difference between *evaluating* how something is going and *measuring* how it is going. In some cases, you can simply evaluate without performing crazy contortions to measure. Of course, such evaluation requires good taste and judgment 6) If you find yourself feeling upset by any of these words, consider perhaps that you might have tied too much of your identity to a certain way of operating and want to remain convinced that yours is the only right way 7) If, after considering this, you still don’t feel any differently, that’s okay. Not everything will resonate with everyone at all times. Maybe come back to this idea in a few years and see how it feels then P.S. Some people proudly repeat the “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” quote, not realizing that they are actually mis-quoting Deming, who actually said the exact opposite: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” 🙂

A B2B Product Management Story: on discovering problems that customers actually care about Very visual story thread👇🏾