A metric for investing in your team

Here is a thing not many people will say out loud: investing in your team is hard.

Often, it is an expected part of a founder, executive, or leader's job but not valued in the same way that revenue, customers, product use etc. are even though investing in your team is what helps you hit those goals.

Coaching / leading a team is also the defining factor in whether or not you are creating sustainable and responsible growth with purpose, with equity...or just floating some line about diversity or meritocracy.

How you design your internal choices (or not) and enable your team to keep iterating, changing, updating, seeing opportunity individually + together, that's the whole battle.

You'll never hear this at a board meeting or on a quarterly earnings call, but it matters.

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One Growth Metric to Rule Them All is fine until you’re building a company

Finding and increasing growth is critical to an early stage business.

But it’s also hard to explain, and on the surface it can look very tactical: you isolate something that works, then test to see how much you are able to increase it. 

If you’re good you’ll work on a bunch of these tests at once, and funnel them into one metric that drives all of your efforts, and revenue. That one metric is often something like average daily use (DAU) or how likely they are to refer a friend (using net promoter score or similar). The key is to focus on a metric that drives your core business, and rises all of the other metrics, including revenue. 

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