What gets measured gets managed.

Peter Drucker

The above management wisdom has percolated into even the tiniest cracks of the modern corporate hierarchy. These days, a typical knowledge worker has a multitude of KPIs, goals, metrics et al being tracked across a hodgepodge of software supported by different business functions. They’re tracking goals in CultureAmp so that HR can track their performance, they’re tracking KPIs on a business dashboard so that they’re in sync with their managers (and their managers and so on), they’re tracking app performance metrics and error rates, you know, for their BAU and just so many other numbers across so many dashboards (some of them, often abandoned). There’s probably a wiki page or a dashboard of dashboards to catalogue all of the numbers which are absolutely vital to the organization.

And usually, in this plethora of available information, what gets lost is signal. The team attention is a vector that is often being pulled in many competing dimensions with arguably no aligned sense of priority or purpose. And as long as the numbers are moving in the right direction in some of these dashboards, the team is thought to be making progress, even though the team members are left shrugging. Continue this behaviour for too long, and you have a disjointed set of unmotivated players in the team that seems to be performing, but nothing much is actually happening.

Instead, I propose the following:

Every 2 pizza team should have a single Key Metric they are responsible for.

There should be just one needle, at a given time, that a (high performance) 2 pizza team is obsessively focused on moving. Everyone in the team needs to know exactly what this metric is, why this metric is important to the organization’s goals and how exactly are they going to attempt to move it in the right direction. Even if you ask a random team member, on a random Monday, they should know the value of this metric from memory.

If the organization cannot assign a single metric to a team, I would say the organization’s goals are unclear. If there are more than one metrics that seem equally important, then the teams should be subdivided to focus on them. The key metric can be tracked for as short of a time span as a week to as big of a time span as needed, with measurements being made as frequently as possible.

This probably doesn’t work for every organization, and business literature might hint at the necessity of tracking many different numbers for a bunch of valid reasons. However, the simplicity of this approach is undoubtedly its strength – no team or team member can hide behind not being able to make clear, visible progress (this assumes the organizational culture isn’t so corrupt that the team spends their effort gaming the metric to make progress – I’ve definitely seen people do this).

Have you worked in such a team before? What are your thoughts?