# Excerpt 1
Author: [[balajis]]
- <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The metrics we’re optimizing are pageviews, engagement, and attention.<br><br>The metrics we *should* be optimizing are more like knowledge, physical fitness, and net worth.<br><br>What else?</p>— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) <a href="https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1422870490603921412?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 4, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
# Excerpt 2
Author: [[sriramk]]
Source: https://sriramk.com/building-unmeasurable-things
- Since it is near impossible to perfectly measure human behavior, most large teams/products pick a proxy metric to measure underlying behavior. For example - ‘clicks’ are a proxy for “did I read this?” and “will I buy this product sometime in the future?”, ‘time spent’ is a proxy for “did I enjoy this content?” and NPS is often a substitute for “do I love this company?”. You convert a nebulous human emotion/behavior to a quantifiable metric you can align execution on and stick on a graph and measure teams on. Engineers and data scientists can’t do anything with “this makes people feel warm and fuzzy”. They can do a lot with “this feature improves metric X by 5% week-over-week”. Figuring out the connection between the two is often the art and science of product management.
- For example, in terms of what designers wanted, what they built/measured and what they unintentionally caused:
- Quality journalism → Measure Clicks → Creation of click-bait content
- Whether an ad resonates with a human being → measure how long someone saw an ad → varied tactics to game people into seeing an ad.
# Angadh's Takeaway
- Howler can have metrics from two perspectives:
- **User-centered metric**: This should be on the UI.
- percentage of a Howler listened to $= f($duration of Howler, playback speed$)$.
- Patience metric.
- Multi-tasking metric.
- Productivity.
- **App success metric**:
- Network effect metric: Some way to measure [[Network Effects]].
#values