Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern summarized Goodhart’s law most succinctly saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
If a measure becomes a target, it creates incentive to hit the target. This perverse incentive leads to behaviors that can be counterproductive.
Links to this note
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How to Measure the Health of a Startup
Here are the most useful metrics I’ve found for running a startup. These should be measured and reviewed regularly. The metrics that matter most the ones that raise questions and drive useful discussions. Try to avoid difficult to calculate metrics that are hard to build an intuition about (people don’t expect much from simple ideas).
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Productive engineers should write one pull request per day. One pull request per day creates forward momentum. Forward momentum leads to progress. Progress is how teams overcomes their biggest challenges.