In practice, consciously making data driven decisions is hard.

The internal pull to trust your intuition is so strong that people unwittingly skew data to support our original gut feeling.

Trying to make data-driven decisions doesn’t work.

What can work, is hot-wiring your intuition to be data-driven. It’s crazy, but it can work… which is why we run a metrics-driven startup.

What does this mean?

Obsessively track your metrics.

At Localize we invest a lot of time making our key metrics easily accessible to our team. We have 50 data points displayed by the day, week, and month.

Our team checks the company’s key metrics every day. Continually monitoring metrics completes a feedback loop that enables us to learn how changing our marketing or product affects the performance of our business.

Doing this builds a pattern-recognition process in your brain that’s always running. When you’re planning what to work on next, you already know what has worked in and what hasn’t, without pulling data.

Over time, you start making data-driven decisions intuitively. Without trying.

What’s the best way to create a metrics-obsessed culture?

Have a key metric that everyone follows

Your team should have ONE key metric. It’s the number that’s most important for the company’s growth. It’s usually revenue or active users.

Everyone within your startup should know what your key metric is, and everyone should be able to see whether this number is growing or shrinking, and how fast.

Our #1 key metric at Localize is monthly recurring revenue. We track this metric on a rolling basis, which means adding up all recurring revenue that we’ve received in the past 30 days.

Have a weekly growth goal

It’s not enough to have a key metric. You must also track and monitor it.

Having a weekly growth goal creates a structured way of reviewing metrics on an ongoing basis. Your team will naturally be motivated to check the metrics daily to see if the company is on track for the week.