This is a guest post from James Slavet of venture firm Greylock Partners. Slavet's investments include Coupons.com, Groupon, One Kings Lane and Redfin. Greylock Partners has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora. After years of leading teams and then, at Greylock, watching some of the best startup CEOs in the world, I've learned that the most important metrics are often ones you never read about on the income statement or in the financial press. "If you can measure it, you can manage it" is a business saying that goes way back. Maybe it was Henry Ford who said that, or Peter Drucker? Regardless, most managers only measure outputs, not inputs, which is like telling a Little League team to score more runs, rather than actually explaining how to swing a bat and make contact with the ball. Similarly, most companies measure traffic, revenue or earnings, without considering how to improve the company at an atomic level: how to make a meeting better, or an engineer more productive. Here are five metrics that great teams should measure: Metric 1: Flow State Percentage Jobs that require a lot of brainpower -- software programming for instance -- also demand deep concentration. You know that feeling when you're "in the zone," cranking on something. That is flow , a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . Unfortunately, most of us are constantly interrupted during the day with meetings, emails, texts, or colleagues who want to talk about stuff. These interruptions that move us out