[donaldo]

I think startups should stop using KPIs or BI dashboards. As a great friend said, “The best pilots can fly without looking.”

Same thing applies to Rubik’s cubes and 99% of complex challenges.

Just anecdote, so curious to hear what others think.

[salsakran]

The best pilots most certainly use instruments when in clouds, storms or nighttime.

The trick with startups is that half the time you don't know you're in the clouds until too late. Especially in companies with immature reckoning of what customers are costing you, how growth is actually going and what users are doing, it's easy to hit a mountainside before you even realize you're off course.

It's worth pointing out that most KPI dashboards tend to be simply bad, and people tend mismatch their metrics to their cadence (eg looking at total numbers in a nightly email or quarterly numbers in a weekly kpi dashboard). Stop me before I rant for 20 pages on whether KPIs in the wild actually have anything to do with predictive performance of a function vs a backward looking number of convenience.

[nvader]

There is not even an anecdote here, just folksy hearsay that has been debunked in aviation. See this article on Spatial Disorientation, especially the section on the Graveyard Spiral.

https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...

You would probably agree that the point of a start-up is to learn, i.e. to validate hypotheses as quickly as possible. That's what KPIs are meant to track.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Rubik's cubes or 99% of complex challenges". Do you mean actual Rubik's cubes? Are they not fairly well-understood now? Here's a 3-year-old girl solving a Rubik's Cube in 47 seconds. That's a pretty clear Key Performance Indicator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqnJEwcNDuM

[bryanrasmussen]

I would think KPIs are useful at mid level and higher, once you have more people than you can have in depth conversations with within maybe the span of 3 days you need to set organizational and group goals that are simple enough that people can follow without talking to you.

on edit: or maybe a more clear rule is when you have managers between you and other employees, the KPIs tell you how things are going but also tell the managers how you will interpret how things are going, and give them easy numbers they can use to tell the people they supervise how things are going. Of course they are only useful if people can communicate back why they think the KPIs are faulty and if those communications will be listened to - which places I've worked at that used KPIs, this was not something one could do.

[josho]

I agree that the best may not benefit much from KPIs. But what about the average and below average performers? That’s where process and KPIs can really help drive performance improvements.

[donaldo]

Good point, I agree with you on that.