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Xueqiang Pan's avatar

I am currently addressing the user acquisition problem for the new app I am working on, and your article provided me with valuable insights. Thank you so much!

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Yunkai Zhou's avatar

Glad to hear this helped. :)

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Lu Zhang's avatar

“Meta has an everyone-is-scared-of-performance-review culture.” I’m curious about how you coach people when you hear about this?

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Yunkai Zhou's avatar

No silver bullet solution, honestly. I try to point out "skills growth" is the real goal, not "title growth" or "rating growth". For some people, this reminder works well; for others, it falls flat. I adjust my time spend in future accordingly when it comes to help people. :)

Not sure if this is a satisfactory enough answer?

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Stuart Marshall's avatar

Great insights! I mean that - you gave me a lot to think about.

Regarding post-data phase: how do you think about intuition during that phase?

I feel like some products chase the metrics too much post launch. How should one balance "Iterate, based on the data" with intuition based decisions once you do have data?

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Yunkai Zhou's avatar

Yeah I agree that chasing wrong metric will lead to problems no matter what. There's a saying "strategy determines metrics, not the other way around". To fully answer your question, it needs a long article by its own right, but in short, all metrics are by definition proxy, and need to constantly re-evaluate how close the current proxy metric reflects true north star. In other words, "respect data", does not mean "respect proxy metric".

Does this make sense?

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Stuart Marshall's avatar

Yup, agreed!

The team needs to have metrics that align with strategy and help guide ongoing decisions. The team also needs to periodically re-assess strategy and related metrics.

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