KPIs? Really? It's 2024. Can't we just ask Claude to generate those for us? We say… no. There are lots and lots of things that AI can take on or streamline, but getting meaningful, outcome-oriented alignment within a set of business partners as they plan a campaign, project, or initiative isn't one of them! Or, at least, we're pretty sure that's what our special guest for this episode would say. He's been thinking about (and ranting about) organizations' failure to take goal establishment, KPI identification, and target-setting seriously enough for years (we found a post he wrote in 2009 on the subject!). He also really helped us earn our explicit tag for this episode — scatologically and onanistically, we're afraid. But solid content nonetheless, so hopefully you can hear past that! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Most of the time, we think of analytics as taking historical data for a business, munging it in various ways, and then using the results of that munging to make decisions. But, what if the business has no (or very little) historical data… because it's a startup? That's the situation venture capitalists — especially those focused on early stage startups — face constantly. We were curious as to how and where data and analytics play a role in such a world, and Sam Wong, a partner at Blackbird Ventures, joined Michael, Val, and Tim to explore the subject. Hypotheses and KPIs came up a lot, so our hypothesis that there was a relevant tie-in to the traditional focus of this show was validated, and, as a result, the valuation of the podcast itself tripled and we are accepting term sheets. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

How do we measure the performance of this podcast? With well-formulated KPIs, of course! With targets set for them. Since Tim is the taskmaster who insists we revisit our KPIs every year, we decided he would be our guest for this show, and Michael and Moe would take turns trying to stump him with impromptu role playing as difficult stakeholders in challenging scenarios. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

One of our KPIs for the show is to keep the Topic Repeat Rate (TRR) below 1.2%. From carefully monitoring our show dashboard, we had an actionable insight: we could finally revisit episode #002. Conveniently, the topic of that show was dashboards, which explains the self-referential stemwinder of a description of this episode. That show was "a long, long time ago. We can still remember… when the dashboards used to make us smile." For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Raise your hand if you work for a company that sells exclusively low-consideration products and only sells them online. Anyone? Anyone? We only see a couple of hands out there. For all the rest of you, this episode might be of interest. We sat down with Amy Sample — Senior Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy at PBS by day, president of the DAA board by night — to discuss approaches for effective digital measurement in the absence of a clear online conversion. That challenge doesn't get much bigger than in the mission-driven, not-for-profit world of public television! After listening to this episode, you may actually feel like you have it easy! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.  

One year of shows. It was our initial Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and we did it. We hoped you had as much fun this year listening as we did recording, and we'd like to take a chance to reflect. Did we hit our initial KPIs (because of course we had them)? Did we have a favorite show? Is there something we'd like to do next year? Tune in and end 2015 by listening to a podcast about a podcast. We think our navels look awesome. Come gaze with us!