On Metrics and Measurement
This post describes how to design an effective metrics portfolio, focusing on the distinction between durable output business metrics and input metrics. It explores the difference between business, health, and diagnostic metrics, and discusses three flavors of goals: output business goals, controllable input goals, and launch goals. It discusses the standard form in which all…
On Writing Documents
It has been broadly observed that Amazon is powered by a writing culture. Meetings at Amazon typically begin with at least twenty minutes of silent, communal reading. PowerPoints are rare, reserved for presentations to large audiences. However, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of how Amazonians approach writing documents. This document attempts to address…
Wordle Has a Hard Mode (and it’s more fun)
A quick follow-up to my post last week, “Why to Beat Wordle, or, How Information Theorists are No Fun At Parties,” which treats Wordle as an information theory problem. However, the analysis was incomplete, because I was unaware that Wordle has a Hard Mode. So, without a lot of preamble, because I wrote a Very…
Why to Beat Wordle, or, How Information Theorists are No Fun At Parties
VI is for Villainy
On “technical debt”
The term “technical debt” is a useful one. Unfortunately, as with anything useful, it is overused and used sloppily. It’s also sometimes misused to disparage a historical decision somebody disagrees with. But more than that, I think it is broadly misinterpreted. The term is intended to help justify work that has no immediate customer benefit,…
We Must Invest in Public Safety
Are you having the right conversation? I want to talk about the racial through-line that has existed in American politics from the very beginning, from the 3/5th compromise in the constitution, to the Civil War, to “Birth of a Nation,” to Jim Crow, to segregation, to Nixon’s “Tough on Crime”, to Reagan’s “War on Drugs,”…
Primate Stories (1 of 3): “The Oil Drum”
Don’t make decisions by oil drum! …story time: Once upon a time, there was a group of scientists studying a troop of lowland gorillas. There was nothing particularly notable about the study, the scientists, or even the gorillas. I don’t even know what they were studying. Lowland gorillas are have a wider range than their…