Metrics and indicators

My new-to-me car has an utterly annoying feature, where it will recommend changing up as soon as the engine is not actually at risk of stalling. With a straight, empty road, I decided to indulge it and see what would happen.

Tooling along in fifth, the revs were well shy of the 2k mark (I run a turbodiesel) and sure enough, I had a little 6^ in the middle of the dash to encourage me to shift up. The interesting thing to me was that the fuel consumption in fifth was about 5 litres per 100 km, while in sixth it shot up to nearly 10 l/100km. I made sure that the throttle was steady and I wasn’t otherwise affecting the results, but it was completely reproducible. As soon as I shifted back to fifth, fuel consumption dropped, and the car started nagging me to shift up.

This sort of thing is why I am suspicious of the current rush to Big Data. Unless you are very careful and you are sure you understand exactly what is going on, it would be very easy to get caught in exactly the same sort of trap and make wrong decisions. 

This is of course assuming that other factors don’t come into play, further fudging the issue. In the case of my car, I suspect that somebody decided that having a shift-up indicator with its associated ecological do-gooder associations was more important than making sure that its advice was appropriate. 

The corporate world can easily fall victim to the sindrome of “We need to do something! This is something - let’s do this!”. Nothing is more frustrating than to hear that scarce resources have been squandered on some sort of wild-goose chase, instead of applied in the pursuit of a fully thought-out goal.

Far more projects have been sunk by an excess of mis-applied resources than by a straight lack of resources. Make sure that before you do anything, you know the goal that you are trying to achieve. Next, double-check that what you plan to do will move towards achieving that goal. Finally, make sure there isn’t something more important that needs to happen first. Hacking away on a feature that will benefit one or two customers is worth doing, but not at the expense of delaying the next version or cutting features that most customers care about.

Building features just for their own sake is also a quick way to get yourself caught on one horn of the Innovator’s Dilemma. Extra capabilities add complexity to your product, so you need to be sure that you have enough benefit to make the complexity trade-off worth your users’ while.

The easiest way of all to fall into this trap is to follow the herd. “But all our competitors have a hosted version!” So what? Do your customers want it? If you offered it, would they even be able to use it? If they do want it, do they want it today, or is it enough for them to know that you are working on it and will have it ready by the time they are ready for it?

Also, does it come in red? 

***  Image by James Forbes via Unsplash