Thread · 6 tweets · 21 Jan 2021

"You know who manages by metrics? Big companies like Google, Amazon and LinkedIn. And what do they have in common? Their core product got notably worse over time." Some really good, hard truth from @jakobgreenfeld over at jakobgreenfeld.com/metrics.

Decisions are hard and people rarely want to actually be responsible for anything (they just want the trimmings of being "in charge"). The easiest cop out is to make everything "data-driven" (instead of data-informed): that way you can avoid a whole lot of responsibility.

A further problem is that your users will be more legible when they have less autonomy and are made more uniform. So data-driven product development has a vested interest in disempowering users. People don't decide to disempower users — but features that do will measure better.

Whenever I hear a company boasting that it A/B tested 200,000 shades of blue and shapes of a button all I hear is that they must be really shit at making products. That's usually confirmed with a quick look.

TL;DR: feed statistics to your designers, not the other way around.

I forget to say: heard via @podopie!