Knowledge Base · Measurement
Why is celebrating too early dangerous?
Because an early number can flatter you while hiding the real result. In the chapter's case, a team celebrated soaring clicks on a new website feature, only to learn that confused customers could not complete their task and service calls were rising. They had tracked a vanity metric, celebrated before they had the full picture, and had to start again.
The chapter tells the story as a warning. A team put a new feature live on their website and measured success by how many clicks it got. During the first week, the click count soared. The team marked the moment with a celebratory email around the department, chart attached to show the dramatic rise, and a lunch to celebrate their success.
A few weeks on, the customer service team began fielding more calls about the feature. Customers were clicking on it, yet they were confused, and many could not finish the task they had started. Clicks, the vanity metric the team had fixated on, had hidden that bigger picture. The celebration had locked in a conclusion the evidence did not support.
The team went back to the drawing board and picked measures that meant more, among them how often customers completed a task and how satisfied customers said they were. The lesson the chapter draws is direct: steer clear of vanity metrics, look harder at the real effect of your work on customers and on the business, and hold off celebrating until the full picture is in. That is different from the chapter's advice elsewhere to celebrate wins. The wins worth celebrating are real outcomes, confirmed over time, not an early spike in a number that only measures attention.
Related questions
- "What gets measured gets managed": is that actually true?
- How do I know whether an improvement actually worked?
- What is a KPI, and how do I choose the right ones?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 5 (Measuring Success and Ensuring Sustainability).