What Should Be Measured and Why
Measure what drives outcomes, not what's easy to measure. Focus on outcomes over activities, and use leading indicators to predict future results.
Contributions
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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Corrected an unsourced product-management anecdote presented as documented Google company history: the claim that Google's early North Star metric was 'search queries per day' before shifting to a 'first search result page success' metric has no traceable primary source (no Google blog post, executive interview, or book reference could be found). Reframed as a generic illustrative example rather than verified company history.
What the page claimedArticle presented a widely circulated but unsourced product-management parable as if it were documented fact about Google's actual measurement history.
What was correctedRewrote the passage to present the scenario as an illustrative example of the underlying principle rather than a specific claim about Google's documented history.
Why: This is a milder issue than outright fabrication - a real company name was attached to a plausible-sounding but untraceable teaching anecdote. The rest of the article (Hubbard, Kaplan and Norton, Deming, Grove/Intel OKRs, Enron, NHS) verified as accurate, consistent with the companion article designing-useful-measurement-systems.
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