April’s Deliverable
On Kingdom Entrepreneurship & Setting Product Metrics
This year, I set a goal to publish one Medium post at least once a month. I want something published by the 1st of every month. That’s the goal. No matter what it is.
Usually, I write about Product Management, but for April, I wasn’t sure what to write about, and time’s running out, so I’ve decided to do a brief mashup of the 2 topics I had in mind. Both of these ideas are not fully fleshed out, hence I’m only sharing a surface level for now.
1. Kingdom Entrepreneur
The first topic is on working as a Kingdom Entrepreneur. As you may or may not know, I’m a devoted Christian. I love God and I put Him above everything else in my life. I try my best to only make decisions based on the Word of God and what He tells me. This may sometimes make me look foolish, but it’s always worth it. I re-dedicated my life to Jesus on the 31st of January, 2017; I didn’t know what the road ahead entailed, but I was looking forward to it.
I remember the first time I preached in a Church; my cousin walked up to me after and asked “So, no more business?”; he wanted to know what my plans were for business, seeing as I had now dedicated my life to God.
Well, I explained that I was still going to run businesses, but from a different perspective, which brings me to the point of this: A Kingdom Entrepreneur is someone who builds anything with the values of the Kingdom in mind.
I’ve been learning about how to merge the work I do as an Entrepreneur with my walk with God, and what I’ve found out is that Kingdom Entrepreneurs think and act completely differently from other entrepreneurs. The goals, motives, and principles are completely different. Even the word ‘Entrepreneur’ is flawed in the way many people define it; some believe it is “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit…”. For us Believers, our hope isn’t in the profit (money), as we know that we can’t serve 2 masters (Matt. 6:24). It’s much deeper than that. It’s more about service, and exuding Christ in & through our businesses.
This topic is something I have to expound on, as it entails a lot, but this is as much as I can put together for now.
2. Setting Product Metrics
They say “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”, and that has proven to be true, especially for products. Setting the right Metrics is important. Setting the wrong metrics is detrimental and has significant insidious effects.
For example, if you build a mobile application, it’s easy to track certain metrics and think you’re succeeding, when you’re actually not. One metric that may deceive you is the number of downloads your mobile app has. You might wonder “my app has 10 million downloads, what’s wrong with that?”; well, nothing is wrong with that, but if that’s your ‘northstar metric’, then everything is wrong with it, simple because the number of downloads doesn’t tell you about the usage. 10 million people might download the app, but only 100,000 people may be using it as frequently as they’re meant to. Take Instagram, for example, the number of app downloads doesn’t matter to Instagram; the number that matters is the amount of people that use it every day or every other day. This helps the team make decisions for marketing, monetization and much more. Setting the right metrics will help improve product distribution, iteration and much more.
That’s that for metrics. Well, that’s as brief as I could be.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it for April.
