"Mirror mirror on the wall, what is the vainest metric of them all?
summary
Argues that common KPIs — Twitter/Instagram followers, raw pageviews, daily builds, commit counts, stars and story points — are misleading and often vanity metrics; shows workarounds and real indicators: conversion funnels, cycle time, MTTR and MTBF, limiting WIP. Gives concrete examples: switching to the Please build system drops builds from 15 minutes to 40 seconds, moving infra cuts $3k/mo to $2k in three days, a monolith with 1.6M LOC, a 12k-commit GitHub user, and a 15 TB metrics cluster that proves “measure everything” fails.
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chapters (4)
- 0:00Start
- 8:13Can I make a business decision based on this metric?
- 10:04Can I intentionally repeat this result?
- 11:23Is the data a real reflection of the truth?
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