Defining success with your box

Data teams are great at metrics and goals. We love numbers, charts, graphs, and tables.

But we are terrible at understanding and defining terminal goals. Or what I call Destination Metrics.

Destination Metrics are the ultimate goal of your team.

“Our team exists to do XYZ”

That kind of statement is hard in itself.

But the next part is harder.

“And we measure our progress and success toward that purpose by tracking YXZ”.

You have three main options when picking a Destination Metric for your data team. Before I explain the options, you need to understand the Box Concept (I’ve written about it more here, and here)

You, as a team, are a box. A contained unit of people, purpose, strategy, flaws, personality, processes, and goals. There are clear walls to your box. You understand where your team begins and ends.

At the same time, your box exists within the context of larger boxes. Mostly obviously, your department and organization as a whole. Each of those are self-contained units, so you can clearly see where the walls are. You know where your department ends. You know where your organization ends.

Yes, the walls of the boxes are fuzzy at times. The culture of the department will bleed into the box of your team. You might have a team member who splits time into different teams and therefore fits into multiple boxes.

But fundamentally, our brains create these boxes with boundaries so that we can make sense of our complex world.

So when it comes to setting a destination metric (i.e. what’s the primary purpose of our data team), here are your three options.

Option 1: Inside the Box

Option 2: Edge of the Box

Option 3: Outside the Box

Inside the Box: Your Destination Metric is defined by the actions and results inside the box. Inside the Box metrics look like things the data team explicitly controls. “Decrease cloud data costs by X%”. “Maintain XYZ% Uptime on data systems”. “Deliver new data requests in Y days”

In this scenario, you optimize for things in the box.

Edge of Box: Your Destination Metric is connected in someway to an element outside your box. You don’t control all aspects of the metric, but it’s highly related to your work. The primary example of an Edge of Box destination metric is stakeholder Satisfaction. This could be NPS or some other method to assess and measure how happy our stakeholders are.

In this scenario, you optimize the edge of box interaction.

Outside the Box: This is the scary one. Your destination metric is not set based on what’s inside the box nor is it based on the edge relationship (that you have some control over). It’s beyond your box entirely. Very often, when you set an Outside the Box destination metric it is the terminal metric of the entire Organization. “Net Revenue”, “Student Outcomes”, “Program Participation/Engagement”, “Community Impact”

In this scenario, you are the data team, optimizing your activities to impact something completely outside the box.

What you set as your Destination is how you define success. It’s what you optimize for.

Tomorrow I’ll share another paradigm to think about these 3 options.

I’m glad you are here,

Sawyer