Join me on a roadtrip
Pre-s: Tomorrow at 1 pm ET at a free live webinar: Data Roundtable - Power BI Leadership. If you work with Power BI at your organization, you will find this a valuable conversation.
Here are four fundamental measurements you will encounter in your organization's progress toward their goals.
If you are paying attention to data these are important to identify.
Destination, Waypoints, Signposts, and Gauges.
Consider this a road trip. In a couple weeks I’m driving my family 20 hours south for a vacation, so imagine for a min you are joining us.
First, we pick a Destination. You will know if you made it there by measuring your location against the desired location (you could use latitude and longitude). What’s the distance between current location and destination?
Next, along the way you will encounter Waypoints. These are key progress points along a journey. These could be mile markers on the highway, or key rest stops along the way. You know if you made it to a Waypoint that you are making progress toward your destination.
You will also run into Signposts. Different than Waypoints which track your progress, Signposts give you more contextual information. What city are we in? What’s the name of this road? Is this a good place to stop for lunch? They don’t tell you anything specific about your progress toward your destination, they are useful to help orient you so you can make the next step toward the next Waypoint.
Finally, you have Gauges. These are small objects that you track at different points in the journey. How much gas (or charge) do we have in the vehicle? What’s our speed? How much traffic are we stuck in? Gauges can be important but aren’t worth constant attention. Your fuel will last for a few hours, staring at it constantly won’t help your progress to your destination. Speed is relevant to your progress, but on an interstate, you likely will stabilize in cruise control and forget about your speed for long stretches of time.
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Here’s how this matters for data.
These are all metrics in your organization.
Destination metrics will never change. They are terminal metrics and core to why your organization exists.
Waypoints rarely change. They are the core way you measure progress to the destination metric. Only through substantial business model changes do Waypoints change.
Signposts are constantly changing. They help you know what’s going on around the business (employee morale, economic conditions), but they don’t track your actual progress to the destination.
Gauges are only checked intermittently and often change. How fast a pipeline runs might matter a lot one week, but after optimization you can ignore it for a while. The initial launch of the campaign matters a lot, but as it goes on it requires less monitoring.
Data teams live in the land of metrics. As an exercise, it’s valuable to label the metrics you are responsible for to one of the above categories.
Revenue? Probably a destination metric.
Customer Churn? A waypoint.
Customer satisfaction? Signpost.
Production bugs? Gauges.
A few questions to ask:
How many destination metrics do you have? If you end up with 17 destination metrics, you are confused and need to start over. Organizations have 2-3 destination metrics at most. You likely only have one.
How much time are your spending staring at gauge metrics? You are probably missing key waypoints.
When a new metric request comes in, how should it be labeled? Answering this question will equip you to prioritize the request.
I’m here,
Sawyer
