adrienne on Warpcast

adrienne pfp

Seeing Farcaster DAU chatter on my feed today and it's reminding me of the time I was put in charge of calculating user counts for a public b2b saas company. Active user counts were a big deal at the company. Founder and CEO talked about user counts a lot. Showed up in every slide deck, on our website home page.

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adrienne pfp

The problem: it took 5 days to calculate. I was put in charge of business intelligence and my first task was to "automate user counts". CEO wanted a dashboard. But every earlier attempt led to "our data sucks" "we can't trust the dashboard"

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adrienne pfp

Easy peasy, I thought. My engineering mind thinking it would be as simple as "select * from users where status = active" Only after weeks of research did I realize why it was taking so long to calculate. No one had ever defined exactly what it meant to be an active user...

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adrienne pfp

Because we were reporting to Wall Street in our quarterly earnings report, we had to make sure we didn't include users from demo portals, test/QA clients, or clients that hadn't yet gone live. But we didn't track client status anywhere in a database; info was in various spreadsheets and in the COO's head.

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adrienne pfp

What about usage though? If a user never logged in, should they be counted as active? Well, since we charged by the seat, not by usage, it didn't matter whether the user logged in or not. Well, at least not to Wall Street. But what about to the UX and Product people?

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adrienne pfp

I came to realize something as simple as user counts means something very different to different audiences. Wall Street = user counts as proxy to paying customers UX/Product = actual users logging in and using the software DBA/CTO = all users to model future infrastructure needs and cost

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adrienne pfp

Depending on who you were, active user meant something different. And you only cared about your definition. You were too busy and myopic to even realize there were other definitions. Everyone called their definition "user counts", which is why no one trusted the data or a dashboard

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adrienne pfp

Ultimately we did solve this problem and created a dashboard for Active User Counts that people could trust, but the hard work was less engineering and data science, and more social and organizational - aligning people around a common language before looking at data

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yaffle 👽🎩💊 pfp

yaffle 👽🎩💊

The more I advance in tech, the more I realise it's all about people after all.

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vrypan |--o--| pfp

As I grow older, I realize I sound pedantic when I ask teams I participate in to **define** what they mean. But this is a great example! I often think they unconsciously avoid doing so, because being a bit vague allows them to hide issues (technical, politics, business) they know they are there.

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chet pfp

had a similar experience defining active readers in media. each business unit and editorial section lead wanted to view it differently across the publication and its social channels.

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ZEN🎩 pfp

Thanks for the great thread. it's important to make sure we understand what the numbers mean. 25 $DEGEN

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Spaceman Spiff 🎩🍖 pfp

Spaceman Spiff 🎩🍖

@spaceman-spiff

Thank you for the valuable perspective on a multifaceted topic. 20 $DEGEN

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