Archie Abrams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Fascinating. One more tidbit that I've heard about how you all think about this is metrics. And you mentioned before we started recording that a lot of the company doesn't actually have metrics that drive what they build, especially within the core business, which I think surprised a lot of people. Most people are like, "Every team needs a metric and a KPI, and this is how we measure progress and this is how we know if they're doing well." Talk about just how that works, how most of the companies doesn't have a metric. Yeah. It's funny, we ran against KPIs are basically banned as OKRs or banned and all that. And so certainly, in growth you have metrics, but they take a different form. And then in core, it truly is, do we have conviction that this is the right technical foundation to build the future of commerce? And that is built through certainly looking at data. So it's not that teams are not looking at data and using it as a piece of their puzzle, but it's not the overriding. And when we go to ship a feature in core, it's not like a team is held accountable for this metric over this six months. It's much more, did we ship the right thing? And we're going to kind of get at that through a variety of lenses. Could be some of that could be data, qualitative, just our own product sense of what's good or not. And so I think the upside of that is I think we tend to ship things in core and that are incredibly forward-facing and we take more risk. I think to acknowledge some of the downside of it though is sometimes conversations get extremely subjective about what is the right thing to do. And so that requires the right way of having good discussions, openness from all leaders and from teams to debate those things. But it does result in some squishiness, which again has its pros and cons, but taste is what drives a lot of what we're shipping in core. Yeah, I'm glad you touched on that. I was going to say, okay, everyone would love this idea of just build things that we think are awesome. It's going to be great. But then you build a whole org with teams and people building stuff. How does one know if they're building things that are good and helping versus not? And you're pointing out there are pros and cons to that. The pros is we're not optimizing for some short-term wins and driving some poor metric. The con is you might ship stuff that... There's a lot of subjectivity, and people may not agree, and it's a lot of squishy stuff.…

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