Don’t Let a Single Metric Drive Your Business

It’s impossible to capture the complexities of your business with a single metric. Prioritize a single headline number — to the exclusion of all others — and you’ll invariably leave a lot of people and priorities out. Moreover, you’re likely to constrain your growth. Instead, you need to think about a constellation of metrics that focus on the measurement of three things: quantity, quality, and efficiency. These three metrics in relationship to each other tell the story of your business and allow for prioritization and alignment. They become a shorthand language internally when committing resources and making investments — or trade-offs. No metric is perfect. But understanding, and regularly reassessing, the relationship between quantity, quality, and efficiency is critical to more deeply understanding your business — and to staying nimble. It will enable you to drive what matters most — the customer experience — and empower all of your teams in the process. Done right, metrics are among the best ways to make people truly understand how their work impacts the business in a positive way.