Interview question - how you measure success and efficiency in what you do? [duplicate]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Job revolving around programming, community outreach, developer evangelism - getting more people to use the platform.

• http://www.dummies.com/business/business-strategy/how-to-measure-your-strategic-plans-success/
• https://www.processmaker.com/blog/bpm/key-metrics-you-need-to-measure-employee-efficiency/

In the job as a coder, the best metric is whether software works or doesn't work.

In the job involving human element - shall I measure a number of calls, number of emails sent?

Not sure what is the best answer that would score me some points here... Any advice?

EDIT: someone suggested it is a duplicate. Well... I don't think so, maybe there is some genuine metric I should use? Just like agile, kanban, pomodoro there is some magical technique of measuring my success? Or maybe it is a traditional curveball question after all - silly me, me monkey.

Content from an answer given by OP added into the question:

This is my current best effort

Will send it in about 2 hours... You can still help me before I make some disastrous mistake :)

Measuring success and efficiency in what I do - that question made me think.

I’m successful when I’m happy. Happiness can be defined as the happiness of me, the happiness of the company, the happiness of our customers.

We could measure a number of new STO created after a blog post / webinar / video. We could measure a number of visits on the blog, minutes watched on YouTube. We could measure a number of contributors and forks on GitHub.

If we were to measure clicks / likes / downloads, most of the time it is the team effort with a lot of activities already in the pipeline

We can invent a new metric, associated with me personally. Something that has aligned incentives in place. As opposed to one of my previous jobs - going to conferences as an ambassador but being paid for hiring permanent senior node.js developers in London - competing in a market with a shortage of talent. Wish I had more wisdom to realize this mismatch right from the start and realize my negotiation position to call it a BS!

Don’t create gameable metrics - otherwise, it will be “paperclip maximizer” exercise - converting every atom in the universe into a paperclip or paperclip producing machine.

We should talk, discuss, negotiate, agree on an arrangement that is benefiting you, me, community, the universe at large.

manpreet 2 years ago

Having transitioned from engineering to product strategy, metrics can be very tricky, because it can be hard to pinpoint your exact impact. I recommend measuring your individual goals and how they are related team-level, organizational-level or company-level goals.

For developer evangelism, it's likely you're part of the marketing or customer success organization, I would use metrics like click-through-rate, NPS, etc. For instance:

1. How many people are reading your blog posts and how many people then go on to purchase a product or a service? Did a major company adopt your product?
2. How many people attend your webinar? Is there a spike in web traffic afterwards and are they buying anything?
3. Is customer support getting fewer tickets on topic X, partly because of your efforts to educate the community on X?
4. If this is an open source project, are there more contributors now? More features? More adoption?
5. Did you give a talk at a high profile conference? Approximately how many people attend and how many signed up to try/buy your product?