Evaluating employees in product design & development roles →

An unexpected take on a controversy of evaluating employees in product design and development roles from Mike Davidson, a former Head of Design at Twitter.

On decision quality:

There is a phenomenon in tech called easy-to-measuritis which says that we tend to concentrate on the things we can easily measure rather than the things that are most important. [...] We want objective, binary ways of evaluating people so that they are uncontroversial and unassailable, but what we end up with are objective, binary ways to measure the wrong things, or at the very least, things that employees are not in direct control of. Instead, we should be measuring decision quality instead of outcome quality. After all, how we behave is always 100% within our control.

On four pillars used at Twitter Design:

[...] reward behavior over outcomes, emphasize the importance of teamwork and execution, and keep everything within each employee’s control.