Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output.

It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.

Every early stage startup is absolutely metric driven: keeping the business alive based on Runway

“Blindly” is the operative word here.

That’s almost an oxymoron

You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data

You might be optimizing for the wrong thing, but it’s not blind, it’s just a bad “model”

The blindness is to reality and nuance.

If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.

Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.

> You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data

"Tickets closed" is an amazing data driven & blind to the data metric. You can have someone closing an insane number of tickets, looking amazing on the KPIs, but no one's measuring "Tickets reopened" or "Tickets created for the same issue a day later".

It's really easy to set up awful KPIs and lose all sight of what is actually happening while having data to show your bosses

That’s a good example for sure - I’d still argue it’s a problem of using the wrong economic model

Success = tickets closed, is wrong, but data driven