A Practical Guide to Maintaining Alignment Between Your Mission and OKRs.
By: Daniel Mcguinness
Tags: Metrics, Business Strategy, Product Management, Mission, Organizational Culture

Example 2: Facebook

The Facebook product team is well known for being extremely dynamic and capable, and is perhaps the best scaled companies at driving growth, paired with world-class data scientists and analysts. But how can we tell if their metrics are driving them toward their mission?

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.⁴

Unfortunately, Facebook is a bit more tight-lipped about their metrics. Let’s instead, consider some hypothetical metrics for facebook.com, and examine how the wrong metrics might create side effects counter to the mission.

First hypothetical metric:

Let’s assume that Facebook product managers care about this metric:

Total number of active facebook accounts.

It’s hard to imagine a world where this isn’t a primary metric for Facebook. In this case, that’s probably a good thing. Like Airbnb, this metric encourages them to think globally instead of focusing on high-income areas, and in fact, the numbers support this. As of July 2020, Facebook had more account holders in India than their home market, the United States. This feels like a metric well suited to furthering their mission.

Second hypothetical metric:

Let’s now assume another metric is core to the Facebook product organization.

Visits per week per active user.

On the surface, this seems like a fairly aligned metric. More interactions give more opportunities for connecting with others. But what are the gaps in this metric, and where could this lead to optimization in the wrong direction?

More is not necessarily better if the conversation is neither building community nor bringing people closer together. How do we ensure that we’re not just optimizing for one-off interactions that don’t build connection? Furthermore, how do we ensure the product is genuinely building that connection in a positive way?

How could we address the gaps in this metric? If we looked at Airbnb for an example of balancing goals, we could perhaps introduce another threshold metric to the mix. This way we can account for growth while also watching for unexpected side effects:

% of users interacting positively with “unlike” users.

We all know how much of an echo chamber Facebook can be, but also how harmful the comments section tends to be on the web. This metric requires a bit of complex measurement, particularly around positivity and “unlike” users. The idea here could be to encourage connection even with people that are not the same as them. Fortunately, Facebook has the core capability of making sense of massive amounts of data, so tagging positivity of interactions and ‘unlikeness’ of users shouldn’t be an issue.

This is by no means a silver bullet, and I’m sure someone with a better understanding of Facebook’s interactions and user behavior could come up with a more appropriate metric, but the point stands. It is essential to take a critical eye toward your metrics and identify what adverse effects might cause problems. Then, take actions to update metrics or introduce threshold metrics to ensure you stay the course toward your company mission.

A few Steps to improve metrics to better align with mission.

Remember —our goal is to affirm the fundamental question of metric and mission alignment:

If we succeed in improving our metrics, will we be moving closer to fulfilling our mission?

Then consider more specifically: