LA CTO Forum – Metrics Discussion

John Shiple — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:22:44 +0000

Last Friday, the LA CTO Forum hosted a discussion on the various metrics used to measure ourselves and our companies. I was asked to participate, and eagerly dug into my archives. I found a bunch of old examples, sanitized them, and was struck by how much metrics evolve over the lifecycle of a company. I was inspired enough to put together a diagram that describes how the metrics for a product or startup company evolve over time. My files are here:

Here is a basic description of the contents of each report:

Definitions – definitions of metrics
Dashboard – dashboard view of key metrics
Executive Summary – summary of key metrics
BizDev Funnel Lite – early stage business development funnel
BizDev Funnel – later stage business development funnel
Marketing Funnel – early costs/revenue numbers
Member Funnel – tracking and monetizing users
Customer Satisfaction – customer satisfaction by product
Customer Support Triage – large product defects, customer support in triage mode
Customer Support Daily Recap – daily metric for support
Customer Support Steady – later stage monitoring of support
Operations – some simple operational metrics
Engineering Triage – crisis-based tracking of engineering errors
Human Resources – some basic hiring metrics
Revenue – an early set of of metrics for revenue

You may have a different interpretation of how to measure things, so please feel free to change the parameters to suit your needs. Let me know what you think.

-=John

FreelanceCTO » measure

LA CTO Forum – Metrics Discussion