Results Matter Most

Companies exist to make money. Full stop.

That can land as cynical, so be clear about what it means. Plenty of companies do good in the world. They improve lives, protect what people have worked for, solve problems that matter, cure diseases. For example, the work I've done in cybersecurity helps protect assets for people across the globe. For me, it's about protecting the retirement savings my parents worked forty long years to save.

None of that good can happen if the company doesn't make money first. The mission depends on the margin. A company can exist to do good, to ship a great product, to take care of its people, and all of that is real. It just can't do any of it broke.

So results matter most. Not because money is the point, but because money is what keeps the point alive.

Why this belongs in a product playbook

It's easy, in product, to fall in love with the work itself. The elegant solution. The clever feature. The beautiful research deck. All of it can feel like the goal, and none of it is.

I see this constantly. Most of the startup founders I mentor are obsessed with their solution and treat the problem it's supposed to solve like the most annoying objection in the room. They've got it backwards. The goal isn't the work. It's to create value the business can capture.

If your discovery, your experiments, and your launches don't connect to a result the company cares about, you're doing expensive arts and crafts.

Measure the right thing, from day one

Here's where most teams lose the thread. They never track whether the result showed up. Or worse, they track the wrong number and call it a win.

Picture a company that launches a new app to open a new sales channel. Say it pulls two million downloads, and leadership is thrilled. That number gets quoted in every all-hands for months. But the downloads don't mean anything on their own. The job was to sell. If the research before launch said two million downloads should produce fifty thousand sales, and you've got twenty (not 20,000... TWENTY), the number everyone's celebrating is hiding the actual story.

That's a vanity metric. It goes up and to the right and tells you almost nothing about whether you solved a problem someone will pay for, stay for, or come back to. Downloads. Sign-ups. Page views. They feel like results. They aren't.

So pick the numbers that actually prove value, and plan them before you build. Decide what success looks like up front. Name the few metrics that would tell you it happened: sales, retention, active use, whatever maps to the real outcome. Then build the tracking in from the start, and make it automatic. If pulling the numbers is a pain, people quietly stop pulling them, and you're back to guessing. The metrics you can see without effort are the ones that actually get used. John Doerr wrote a whole book on this, Measure What Matters. The title is the entire lesson.

This page won't get into the KPIs themselves. That comes later, in its own section and in the toolbox. The point here is simpler. A result you didn't plan to measure is a result you'll never know you got.

Bring leadership along, don't correct them

There's a trap waiting in all this. Sometimes the people who love the vanity metric most are the senior leaders above you. The big download number makes the quarter look great. It feels like proof the bet paid off.

When the vanity metric looks fantastic and the product isn't working, your instinct is to walk in and tell them they're wrong. Don't. Nobody changes their mind because you corrected them in a room.

Connect the real number to their goal instead. They already want this to work. So show them: the downloads are great, and here's what happens to revenue when those users actually buy, and here's the gap between the two right now. Make the better metric the thing that gets them what they were already chasing. You're not calling them out. You're handing them a clearer view of the win they want. Do that, and they start asking for the real number themselves.

Hold it honestly

Keeping results at the center is not the same as being short-sighted or mercenary. The best way to drive durable results is to genuinely serve your customers and genuinely develop your people.

Serve your customers and they stay. If they're leaving your product, the company won't last long, no matter how good the launch looked. Develop your people and they get better at the work, they stick around, and the whole operation improves with them. Neither of those is in conflict with making money. Over any real time horizon, they're how you make money.

So hold this one firmly, but not coldly. Care deeply about your customers. Care deeply about your team. And stay honest that all of it has to add up to a result, because the result is what lets you keep doing the work at all.