Nick Cannariato- Metrics with a Purpose: Fostering Joyful and Productive Teams in Support
Nick Cannariato is a co-founder of Yetto, a tech company that focuses on product development and management. With a diverse range of skills, Nick brings expertise in technical writing, project management, and product development. He is well-versed in programming languages such as TypeScript, Python, and Ruby, which allows him to effectively contribute to software development projects. Nick is also experienced in working with databases like PostgreSQL and utilizing cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Watch the below conversation video featuring Nick Cannariato our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit, where he dives into the flaws of individualized metrics in customer support. This video offers a sneak peek into the compelling insights Nick will be sharing on stage in Oakland. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
Nick Cannariato:
The reason I care about metrics is that I spent the majority of my career being measured.
I've never actually been a leader, so I've always been in the position of being measured and not implementing the measuring. I've done everything from call center support to chat and email support to in-person, like a retail technician and I think one of the problems that I felt early on was the priority was work that was easy to measure, not necessarily work that was most impactful.
It is always true that you can like, move this down or really common things like, okay, we're gonna take a statistical sample of every ticket we've answered and average it out for the year, and then we're going to apply that average as a daily target to each individual person. And that's not how averages work.
Scott Tran:
And if it's easy to measure, is it meaningful to measure?
Nick Cannariato:
And also is it a proxy for what you actually care about? There's this, law that I got stuck in my head four years ago, and it's what led inevitably to this talk. It's called " Good Hearts Law". So, once something that you are measuring, just like data becomes like a KPI a thing that you are putting someone's job associated with it ceases to be a valuable metric. That law came to me in this book, " The Tyranny of Metrics", all of these built-in assumptions of the way that you are good at this work is by making numbers go up or down depending on which number it is.
It led to me very specific kind of rethinking a lot of problems that we talk about, we talk about things like cherry picking, and what we, leaders call cherry picking, people doing the work, think of as not getting fired.
Scott Tran:
I was just gonna say, you it's, an Optimal Gaming Strategy, right?
Nick Cannariato:
And as a result, your performance metrics are applying equally to your, very senior people who should really only be working on, five tickets a day, but they're the five tickets that only those people can answer.
And you're putting them in a system where they have to do the same tickets that your tier one people are doing at like 40 or 50 a day. And that means that as a senior support person, I have no choice but to steal password reset tickets and take them from people who can't do the other tickets that I can do, but mine take four or five hours and you can't measure that time.
Or, you've put me in a position where I would be fully capable of writing a piece of documentation, answering one ticket, over the course of three days. And that piece of documentation would prevent the next thousand tickets from opening about this issue. But you can't measure that. So that doesn't count. You can only measure the one ticket I answered.
And so my numbers look really, really bad. But I've actually done something that's more impactful. It's just not something that you're caring about.
Scott Tran:
And, so, how do you resolve this? Because you certainly don't wanna go to not use any data.
Nick Cannariato:
I think there are two, there are two things at play. Part of what motivated the move toward metrics in support and in most jobs is a desire to create objectivity. Like a desire to not be as, at the whim of the biases of your leaders, both in terms of like what your team is doing and also in terms of the future of your own role.
If your manager theoretically hates you, but you have really good metric numbers then at least you still have a job. I think one of the things that we lose there is the understanding that good work is not always measurable, in particular, it's not always measurable at an individual level. see like how teams have an effect on things, but you can't see necessarily how one person played a part in that in all cases.
And so what I kind of advocate for and think about is moving away from this focus on like individualized metrics and KPIs, that are easily gained by just the nature of them being easy to measure on an individual level and moving toward kind of the same service model that infrastructure and engineering teams work on.
We have SLAs, right? Tickets are gonna be answered at a certain time there are actually two other acronyms that are related to that. There are SLIs, which are Service Level Indicators. That our tickets are being answered in an appropriate flow. And then there are service-level objectives. Which are SLOs, if an SLI is, how do we know if we did a good job? And an SLO is, what are we trying to do? An SLA is, did we do it?
And I think lends itself to teamwork in a way that, that makes a lot of sense. And then use the SLIs on an individual level just to measure the health of your ICs.
And related to that, in engineering, we learned not to track lines of code because, we don't want more code, we want better code. In the same way, though I don't think we've learned that lesson in support. We like to measure the number of tickets you're answering, but we don't want more tickets. We would actually like fewer, but nothing that we've measured and nothing that we've tied people's salaries to incentivize us to have fewer tickets.
Scott Tran:
So we're looking at things kind of from a team level. A, so that should make it a little bit harder to gain at an individual level. And then, in theory, that should also make it, tied back to the business as a whole.
Nick Cannariato:
If I'm like I really think this article should be written, and you're like, that's great, I'm gonna put my project down and focus on the queue to make up Slack so that you can go solve this problem. We're working together instead of individually having to maintain these high levels.
You need, to measure things that are outside of your control and you need to measure things that you're affecting, and in particular, you need to weigh your measures based on what you actually want. And right now all of our measures are weighted toward just answering tickets as quickly as possible and as many of them as possible. And that's a losing battle and not actually what we want.
Scott Tran:
And, why is that important?
Nick Cannariato:
Support is often at a disadvantage in that relationship because we are on the clock, we're like heavily measured by how long something takes. And other teams are measured in quarters, whereas we're measured in hours, right?
We often measure how many tickets come in, but we don't often correlate it with a feature shipping schedule and whether, how we ship features as a company is tanking everyone's support metrics over time. We have no control over the number of tickets coming in, even though are aware that it drastically affects what's going on.
And we just kind of have to deal with all of that.
Scott Tran:
It goes back to that holistic view of, what is it to measure across the company, right? That kind of encompasses what are you trying to accomplish, what you care about rather than individually measuring, you know the value of measuring that back-ways and really is that important?
Nick Cannariato:
Supports relative lack of power in an organization has resulted in us having to make up for the mistakes of a lot of other portions of the Org, and our metrics reflect that.
We have to clean up all the bodies that just get buried along the way, and we get stuck in this situation where we're not actually advocating the Org broadly about things that aren't actually our problem, we just happen to be able to be measured for the result of them.
Scott Tran:
I think it's on the support leadership to change that they have the awareness, right?
Nick Cannariato:
I a hundred percent agree with that. I think a very common mistake that happens when people move from an IC role where they're measured on the happiness of their customers is they get into leadership and now they treat their managers and skip-level leaders as their customers who they're trying to make happy.
But just because that empathy muscle is like so built at that point and you're not using it on like customers, you begin to empathize with, leaders who don't actually know what support is doing.
Scott Tran:
Do you think we can come up with standard measures or do you think it's more of like everybody should, figure out like everyone's... Special, right? You need to figure out special measures for...
Nick Cannariato:
I think Brian has this thing that he said that has stuck with me for the last several weeks, months or so, he refers to support as a reverse Anna Karenina. And what he means by that is all successful support teams are successful for unique reasons, having to do with like their company and their customers and the ways that they've molded, how they do support around those things. And all unhappy support teams and all ineffective support teams are unhappy and ineffective for identical reasons.
I think there's an element of your product and your customer and their expectations are going to drastically affect the measures that make sense for you and the ways that you define what is healthy. I have worked places where 15 minutes, of getting back to someone is an eternity. And I have worked places where they're happy if we get to them in nine days. There are ideas that can be universal, but the implementation of those ideas as a measure of health in your support organization is gonna be very, very specific.
Check out the video now featuring Nick Cannariato our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit