The way that Amazon does this is pretty intense. What’s really important is to focus on the “controllable input metrics,” the activities you directly control, which ultimately affect output metrics such as share price. Would the same scene have played out if the share price had dropped 30 cents? The deeper lesson, one that we’ll explore in this chapter, is this: share price is what Amazon calls an “output metric.” The CEO, and companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics. The CEO glanced at it, waved it at us, and proudly said, “Our stock is up 30 cents this morning!” His mood brightened, as if he had personally caused the rise.Īs we drove to our next meeting, Jeff said, “There’s nothing that CEO did to cause that 30-cent blip in the stock price.” I agreed, and added that I wouldn’t be surprised if the assistant had thrown multiple printouts in the recycle bin that morning when the blip wasn’t so big.

During our meeting, an assistant dashed in and handed the boss a sheet of paper. We're going to summarize the entire chapter on our blog in the near future, but I wanted to excerpt a small bit here: Jeff and I (Colin) once visited a Fortune 500 company to meet privately with the CEO in his office. If you're in business intelligence, the good bits about data and analytics and metrics are all in Chapter 6. I mentioned last week that I'm working my way through Working Backwards, a book by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr about how Amazon really works. Insights From Holistics How Amazon Uses Input Metrics This week: why Amazon uses input metrics, a data pipeline is a materialized view, and the case against self-service data and analytics. Inner Join is Holistics's weekly business intelligence newsletter. Sign up here if you'd like more like this. This newsletter was originally sent out on the 24th of February 2021.

Amazon working backwards book