Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

At a desktop software company, leaders look at operations through a twentieth-century retail lens. They postmortem sales reports and channel flow. While they do their best to predict where the business might be headed, their line of sight is largely limited to the rearview mirror. By contrast, a cloud-based business wants to know what is happening now. How many subscriptions came in this week? How many trials are ongoing? What’s our conversion rate? A customer can Google an online product, skim the marketing page, take it for a spin, and make a purchase—all in ten minutes or less. For leaders to keep pace, they should be checking their funnel on a daily basis. At EBS, we need to be thinking about real-time reporting, data, and analytics, even as we build out features like wholesale billing. We’ve captured this necessity in a top-level objective: OBJECTIVE Enable every Intuit worker to make decisions based on “live” data. KEY RESULTS 1. Deliver functional data marts for HR and Sales. 2. Complete migration to new Enterprise Data Warehouse built for real-time access. 3. Create single team operating all data visualization tools across Intuit to drive a unified strategy. 4. Create teaching module to help people in other teams use data visualization tools.