[doctor_eval]

This is the kind of thinking that is wrecking a business I’ve just quit. Management consultant decides that we need more customers so instructs us to open the product up globally. We explain that this is likely to be both expensive (lots of testing needed due to the usual geographic differences), but more important, based on our collected data and the use case (geographically local content), this expensive change is statistically likely to result in only a single new customer (literally, one).

But “every customer counts” so other activities which are likely to result in more customers are put on hold to capture a single customer.

The problem in these cases is often that the management consultant doesn’t consider the resource limitations and opportunity costs of their decisions, particularly if they come from a much larger business. If you have only one lead engineer, then getting them to chase discarded parts (or, in my case, a single customer) makes no economic sense at all.

Quite often, the problem is not a focus on measurement per se, but rather the very human problem of focusing only on those metrics that support the analyst’s intuition.