Dashboards and Paired Metrics

You can't operate a machine without instruments. Rabois wants a dashboard so central that every employee opens it daily and can tell whether the company is winning. If people don't check it, you built the wrong dashboard or you measured the wrong things.

The Grove rule that saves you from gaming: pair your indicators. Every metric, optimized alone, distorts behavior. Measure support tickets closed per hour and quality collapses. Measure signups and you'll happily buy junk traffic. So pair quantity with quality: tickets closed with reopen rate, registrations with activation, speed of hiring with performance of hires.

Also measure what you fear, not just what flatters you. Fraud, churn, latency. The metrics you avoid looking at are usually the ones running the business.