When Metrics Bite!
First published on LinkedIn . On Thursday July 26, 2018, Facebook set a dubious record: The value of their shares plunged 19% erasing $119 billion in market value – the biggest single-day loss in market cap ever for any public company. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal loss was $16 billion! Almost at the same time, Amazon posted a quarterly profit of $2.5 billion pushing its stock up over 4% as their market valuation inched tantalizingly close to $1 trillion! Jeff Bezos is by far the richest man in the world with a personal net worth of over $140 billion. In my non-expert opinion, I feel the market may have overreacted to Facebook’s recent issues. That being said, the contrast in Amazon and Facebook’s fortunes did bring to mind how optimizing internal metrics that aren’t about customer value can eventually bite you. Although financial metrics (revenue and profit growth) are the ultimate scorecard for publicly traded companies, investors and employees often look at other met...