-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Commit
This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.
- Loading branch information
1 parent
163bbd5
commit a98f618
Showing
1 changed file
with
25 additions
and
0 deletions.
There are no files selected for viewing
This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Original file line number | Diff line number | Diff line change |
---|---|---|
@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ | ||
--- | ||
title: The fake news score | ||
description: Discovering the real value of what you're building. | ||
date: 2023-07-11 | ||
tags: | ||
- value | ||
- mvp | ||
- over-optimize | ||
--- | ||
|
||
Years ago, I worked on a platform that billed itself as a newsroom in a box. For significantly less than it would cost to develop all the design and functionality required for a robust newsroom product — design, development, paywall integration, analytics, newsletter integration, ad management, user accounts, AP feeds, etc. — this platform would be turnkey. | ||
|
||
One of the selling points was an easy-to-read score on your site’s dashboard that graded the overall health of your site and setup based on a number of key business intelligence measurements and characteristics. Each day, you would log in and, at a glance, get a sense of how your site was performing. | ||
|
||
Here’s the crazy part: the score wasn’t real. | ||
|
||
Or more accurately, it wasn’t **automated**. | ||
|
||
Each day, someone would gather data from the key measurements for each site on the platform and manually enter them into a spreadsheet. The score was then calculated and displayed on each site’s dashboard. Most people assumed it was some kind of real-time measurement, but it was just someone manually crunching numbers every day. | ||
|
||
For weeks, we had discussed ways to automate this process, but many of the things we wanted to measure didn’t have an API or any other easy way to get at the data. So we decided to do it manually, at least to start. | ||
|
||
The breakthrough moment was when we realized that the value of the score wasn’t real-time automation, it was insight. The people involved in the project were legends in the news industry, so their insights were highly sought after. That was the real value. | ||
|
||
There’s a danger, especially when building systems, to lose sight of what is genuinely valuable in favor of increased automation. [Don’t optimize too early!](https://practicaldesignsystems.com/daily/beware-premature-optimization/) |