When the Metric Becomes the Goal

In Competing Against Luck, former Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen introduces the framework of Jobs to be Done. The main idea is that when creating products and services, one should identify what the customer is really trying to accomplish (the job to be done) and then design to meet that need. 

This quote from Christensen is illustrative: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Here’s the problem: When a team is developing a product, they’re solely immersed in what’s useful for the customer. But once the product is on the market, there’s a shift in focus. 

“We can predict, however, that, as soon as a Job to Be Done becomes a commercial product, the context-rich view of the job begins to recede as the active data of operations replaces and displaces the passive data of innovation.”

The “active data of operations” are things like sales volume, production costs, market share, and press mentions. They collectively become a bright flashing light and demand the attention of the product team. And in the process, the team starts to pay more attention to the data and loses sight of what the data represents. 

In other words, the metric becomes the goal, rather than the measurement of the goal. 

For example, once sales growth is the target, most of the discussion becomes: How can we boost sales? And the team stops asking questions like: How can we better meet the needs of customers (so that they buy more of the product)? 

That subtle shift is what starts a drift from minding the most critical aspects of the product or service to only paying attention to superfluous aspects and vanity metrics.

So the obvious implication for leaders is to push their teams’ attention back to customers and what they’re trying to accomplish. 

Essentially: Get back to fundamentals.

But here’s why that framework was on my mind... 

Last week, I was talking to a client—sharing with his permission—who wanted to design a dashboard to help track his life plan. (And anyone who knows me well will have zero surprise at the fact that I’ve done a lot of work on this!) 

It’s totally possible to create a metrics dashboard for one’s life, but the crux of our conversation was this: Unless you have a clear framework for success, it’s very easy to substitute vanity metrics for the true goals.

It’s easy to target a specific weight, for example, instead of a more core health outcome like “I have enough energy to do what I want to do.” 

Or to target reaching a certain job title instead of tracking “I feel excited when I wake up and think about my day.” 

Or to target a specific net worth or retirement number instead of measuring “I have the financial resources to do what I want.” 

That difference in framing is hugely important. If, say, your goal is framed as “$3 million in retirement savings,” then the questions you’ll ask yourself are limited. 

How can we make more money? 

How can we change our investing strategy? 

But if the goal is “having the resources to do what we want,” then you’ll ask more fundamental questions, like: 

What is it that we want? 

What about that lifestyle is important to us? 

Do we need to wait until retirement to do what we want? Why can’t we do what we want now? 

I shared the following picture with my client. 

This is a real financial dashboard that my wife and I use. It’s just one part of my six-part “framework for personal success and fulfillment.”

I shared the dashboard because it represents the metric substitution problem. All of the items in the first three categories are measurable—the amount of emergency savings, our savings rate, and our investment plan. They are the items that most financial advisors would talk to us about, but they provide a woefully incomplete picture of our financial health. 

The most important aspects of the dashboard are actually in the fourth column. Are we comfortable with our situation and plan?  Do our finances support our values and joy? Do we have flexibility and resilience (hypothetically, providing a reasonable path if one of us wanted to quit his job and pursue a rewarding, yet risky business idea)?

None of those answers can be found in the numbers. They’re not reported on our bank statements, W2s, or brokerage account summaries, which would have all said that we were in good shape.

But we knew there was more to the story because we’d asked ourselves the fundamental questions like What are we really trying to accomplish? and What are the Jobs to be Done by our money?

And we knew that those elements should be reflected on our dashboard as a forcing mechanism to continue to ask the fundamental questions and to update our beliefs.

So yeah, my client is going to create a dashboard for his life plan, but he’s going to start by articulating what he really wants so that he avoids the metrics becoming the goals.

Challenge Questions

How do you define success and fulfillment for yourself? For your family?

What mechanisms do you have to reflect on those core questions?