Last Friday, the LA CTO Forum hosted a discussion on the various metrics used to measure ourselves and our companies. I was asked to participate, and eagerly dug into my archives. I found a bunch of old examples, sanitized them, and was struck by how much metrics evolve over the lifecycle of a company. I was inspired enough to put together a diagram that describes how the metrics for a product or startup company evolve over time. My files are here:

• The Evolution of Metrics
  
• Examples of Metrics for Startups
  

Here is a basic description of the contents of each report:

• Definitions – definitions of metrics
• Dashboard – dashboard view of key metrics
• Executive Summary – summary of key metrics
• BizDev Funnel Lite – early stage business development funnel
• BizDev Funnel – later stage business development funnel
• Marketing Funnel – early costs/revenue numbers
• Member Funnel – tracking and monetizing users
• Customer Satisfaction – customer satisfaction by product
• Customer Support Triage – large product defects, customer support in triage mode
• Customer Support Daily Recap – daily metric for support
• Customer Support Steady – later stage monitoring of support
• Operations – some simple operational metrics
• Engineering Triage – crisis-based tracking of engineering errors
• Human Resources – some basic hiring metrics
• Revenue – an early set of of metrics for revenue

You may have a different interpretation of how to measure things, so please feel free to change the parameters to suit your needs. Let me know what you think.

-=John

Tony Karrer has a great article on When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication. If you have any questions about which companies to connect your authentication system to or how to choose which ones to work with, this is a must read.

I’m so excited. We have an awesome speaker for January’s LA CTO Forum: Rick Parker of Fetch Technologies. Check it out:

Building Your Own Private Cloud

Rick Parker will present his experience and perspective in building a private cloud infrastructure from the bottom up for Fetch Technologies. Over the past three years, Rick has leveraged his experience in building cloud-based platforms to dramatically reduce operational costs by a factor of 4 or more. Rick will discuss analyzing, tracking, and sourcing different types of technologies and vendors in order to stay current with rapidly changing technologies. Rick also plans to address issues with the hardware infrastructure and software management systems as they relate to vendors, models, and services. Fault tolerance, monitoring, reporting, scalability, and deployment will be key components of his his presentation. Finally, Rick’ss assessment of the benefits and costs of developing a private cloud infrastructure should provide a substantial source of topics and ideas for a lively discussion.

Rick Parker (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rick-parker/3/71b/aa5) has over 24 Years of IT experience. At Vendare Media, Rick built the company from an initial desktop environment to 7 datacenters with over 500 servers in them. After that, he went on to found Bedouin Networks, one of the first Cloud Service Providers in 2006. Currently, Rick is an IT Manager for Fetch Technologies, a company that offers cloud-based resources and services to enable organizations to extract, aggregate and use information from sites across the Internet.