Talk Title

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'Once more unto the breach with Goodhart's Law: why metrics have to be targets, even though that sometimes sucks.'

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Abstract

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In this talk, Mark will discuss the conundrum of needing to lead teams and measure their progress, even though Goodhart's Law means that the metrics used to measure will always be some degree of wrong.

 

He'll talk about why this doesn't mean that abandoning all attempts to measure progress with targets is a good response, and specific techniques that help navigate the conundrum.

 

Mark will draw on examples of working with partners from esynergy at Taxually to improve the Accelerate / DORA metrics there, to illustrate these points with some dodgy pseudo-maths and a dash of hard-earned pragmatism.

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Bio

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Mark is the CPTO at Taxually, responsible for the strategic design and development of all of the company's products.

 

In prior / parallel professional lives he is or has been a board advisor, a 30% Club mentor, a Fellow of the RSA, an SVP and Head of R&D at NTT DATA, worked for half a decade doing odd jobs at Google, failed miserably as the CTO of a startup building a video streaming platform for Bon Jovi and the Counting Crows, and spent many years as a developer in the mines of the financial services industry, being punished for his sins.

 

He likes Frisbee and is somewhat less fond of writing bios.