I’ll never forget a meeting I had while head of product at the Uber Developer Platform.
It was a weekly “business review” which, for my department, included some 10-15 people. It was basically a way to hold the product leadership (me) accountable for moving the business forward. It was always intense.
This specific meeting, however, was getting particularly heated.
Some of the stakeholders were upset about my lack of urgency about improving the “the numbers” (I.e the KPIs) that we were ostensibly supposed to focus on.
After trying to explain my hypothesis that we had built the wrong product, these particular stakeholders were unrelenting.
They only wanted to talk about the KPIs.
“I don’t care about the numbers!” I finally blurted out.
The reaction was shock and awe. The room went silent.
No one could believe that I had uttered such a sacrilegious thing!
The fact is that KPIs only matter if…
1. You have product market fit.
2. You’re not facing an existential threat from outside trends and competitors
3. Your goal is to manage toward incremental change
And that’s typically only true if you’re in a mature company acting as middle management.
If you are still trying to find product/market fit, and/or you’re trying to create step-function change, you need to step back from the KPIs and ask yourself larger, more existential questions.
Questions like…
1. How do we drive new levels of disruption
2. How do we solve real problems and delight users
3. How do we significantly grow our Total Addressable Market
Don’t just be a cog in the wheel navigating toward incremental change.
Take the time to lift your gaze and look at the horizon.
When was the last time you looked past “the numbers” and asked some bigger questions?