March 31, 2026

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Hi Everyone,

Q1 ends today, which means a proper quarterly review is in order to figure out what's working - and what’s not.

But before you dive into your review, consider how much of the time is typically spent presenting data versus deciding what to do about it.

Bill Carr, former SVP at Amazon, found that slide-heavy reviews result in 75% of the time being spent on presenting information and only 25% on discussion. The reviews that produced the best results flipped that ratio.

So, how do we cut down the slides and generate more results-focused discussion?

By cutting down the metrics.

You can't act on most of those numbers

Every business review contains two kinds of metrics.

Outputs are the end results. They move over time, but only as a consequence of everything else your team does. You can't act on them directly.

• Revenue
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• Profit margin
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• NPS
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• Churn rate

Inputs are the things your team does every day that eventually affect those outputs:

• How fast you respond to support tickets
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• How many prospects get a follow-up call
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• What percentage of new users finish onboarding
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• How many demos your sales team runs per week

At Amazon, teams spent 80% of review discussion on inputs and only 20% on outputs. You can't walk into Monday morning and directly move last quarter's revenue number. But you can change how quickly your team closes open tickets or how many demos get scheduled this week.

A review full of output charts turns into a reporting session – people present what happened, and the meeting often ends without decisions.

Inputs push the conversation toward what to do next, because everyone in the room can actually affect those numbers.

How to choose fewer, better numbers

Start by breaking your main business outcome into smaller sub-metrics until you reach numbers that are specific enough for one team to own. Then apply two filters:

• Keep the numbers your team is actively trying to move right now
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• Keep any numbers that tend to swing and need watching

Drop everything else. If you can look at a metric in two consecutive reviews and nobody did anything different because of it, cut it.

Here’s a simple way to cut your list. For every metric in your review, ask this question:

Does this metric change anything about how we work this quarter?

If not, move it to a written document people read before the meeting.

Always pair what you track

Keith Rabois, former COO of Square, has a useful rule:

Every number you track needs a second one that catches the side effects.

For example:

• If you tell engineering to ship faster, pair speed with a quality measure.
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• If you're tracking sales volume, pair it with margin or customer retention.

Without the pair, teams might hit the number you're watching while damaging something you're not.

Wells Fargo is the clearest example of what can go wrong. The bank tracked cross-sells as a way to measure customer relationship depth but never paired it with a satisfaction or consent measure. Employees opened 3.5 million unauthorized accounts to hit the target. HBR described what happened as "surrogation," where people replace the actual strategy with the metric that was supposed to represent it.

Go deeper

👉 First Round Review: Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires – Kevin Fishner's full breakdown of scorecard design and review rituals as HashiCorp scaled from 200 to 1,000+ employees

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👉 Sachin Rekhi: A Leader's Guide to Metrics Reviews – practical framework for picking the right number of metrics, building dashboards, and running review meetings

👉 Harvard Business Review: Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business – the research on "surrogation" and how metrics replace the strategies they're supposed to measure

👉 Bill Carr & Colin Bryar: Working Backwards – Amazon's approach to building reviews around controllable input metrics, with detailed examples of how they iterated on metric quality

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow, we're sharing a system for getting 80% of your inbox off your plate without missing anything important.

That's it for today!

P.S. How many metrics are in your current business review deck?