Hi, I’m Taj Pelc. I write about technical leadership, business mindset and enterpreneurship. Daily advice on building fantastic tech teams that deliver great products. I'll see you inside.
Metrics are important, but aren't everything
|
I've written about the importance of quantifying how tech initiatives contribute to business goals. Understanding exactly how a piece of software improves the outcomes we want is very valuable. It is easy to measure a website's load time, uptime percentage, cart abandonment, and conversion from registration to payment. But if you focus only on working on things you can quantifiably improve, you'll likely leave too much on the table. How much does having great dev support that resolves customer issues quickly improve the bottom line? Quite a bit? A bit? How many more subscriptions do we sell if we improve our developer experience? About 11, sir? So yes, metrics are important—but don't discard gut feeling work just because the effects on the bottom line are hard to correlate. Metrics + Gut = 🏆 Yours, |
The TP Daily Newsletter
Hi, I’m Taj Pelc. I write about technical leadership, business mindset and enterpreneurship. Daily advice on building fantastic tech teams that deliver great products. I'll see you inside.
I was making a sandwich analogy. The butter makes things run smoothly. The other components are good tech/business alignment, an agile dev process, testing, and automated deployments. To succeed, you can't get just some parts right; you need to get all the parts right. However, one of the most underrated aspects is the developer experience. I'm constantly surprised by how much pain people suffer through just because it's always been this way. Here's what you can do today ... Make it run in a...
Yesterday, I attended the Czech Executive meetup in Brno, which was held in a WWII-era bunker. As the communists had a top-secret base there, I thought creating a little old-school digital business card to share at the networking event might be fun. I generated the code with Claude, uploaded it to GitHub pages, and programmed an NFC tag with the URL so that you can just tap it with your phone. A hacking game in the middle "protects" the links to my website. Eat the red packet, and you're...
Find out how much <the thing you want to do> is worth. This can help in two ways. If it’s internal it helps you to prioritize and focus on doing the most impactful things. If it’s for a client it helps you set a price as a fraction of that value. That’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Problem is people don’t even try. Here’s what you can do. Break it down into spefic measurable outcomes like increased sales, time saved or reduced costs. Then assign a reasonable estimate to each. Like 10%...