Ashley Stirrup

Don’t confuse shipping with winning. Microsoft figured this out in 2014. For decades, they’d handed out “Ship It” awards. Engineers loved them. Teams competed for them. Then Satya Nadella canceled them. November 7, 2014. His first year as CEO. Not because shipping doesn’t matter. Because when you reward shipping, you get more shipping, not better products. For years, teams had optimized for the wrong thing. You shipped a feature. You earned the trophy. Nobody asked whether users were better off. Ron Kohavi calls this the most important thing he teaches: before you build anything, agree on your OEC, the Overall Evaluation Criterion. The single metric that represents whether customers are actually better off. Not the dashboard full of KPIs. Not the metric that’s easy to count. The one that actually captures customer value. The Ship It award measured effort. The OEC measures outcome. Those are very different things. Most orgs haven’t made that shift. They still celebrate code complete, launch dates, and features shipped. Meanwhile, the metric that actually matters, whether the customer got value, goes unmeasured. What does your team optimize for right now? And is it the right thing? @ronnyk #ABTesting #Experimentation #ProductStrategy #DataDriven