“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
- Not actually Abraham Lincoln
This quote has almost become cliché but I constantly see that, by and large, its message is being ignored.
I am laying out a framework to aid decisions around whether training is worth it and at exactly what point is it worth it.
What is a North Start Metric (NSM)? Let’s start with a definition:
The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers.
- What is a North Star Metric
It serves to unify a company or department to produce a single result that everyone can concentrate on.
tl;dr: skip to the bottom to see the template.
Perhaps the most generic title I’ve ever written. It sounds like it’s straight out of a 1,000+ page 80’s textbook on “Testing Duties in Middle Management”.
The problem is that I frequently run into terrible bug reports. Googling brought about some decent results, but the articles I found were still lacking.
I was recently observing a couple programmers attempt to fix a bug and watched (with considerable tension) the painstaking stabs in the dark as they tweaked and changed different lines of code.
I instantly knew what I would do, and it is much more similar to a binary search (see example below) that rapidly solves almost every bug I come across.
This is an unofficial list of repeated sayings I have found in my studying of startups. This comes from reading, listening, watching, and working in a YC company.
Make something people want. [1, 2, 3] Talk to users. [4, 5] Do things that don’t scale. [6, 7] A small number of users that love your product is better than a lot of people that like your product.
