Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
Summary
When teams don’t know how to pivot, the resulting waste can lead to a slow down in product delivery. Unfortunately, such confusion occurs commonly in UX/Product teams where roles can blur, and overlap between responsibilities can be rampant. In this session, product expert Adam Thomas introduces the concept of “Survival Metrics” — an approach to team collaboration that not only encourages healthy pivots, but puts in place the mechanisms to achieve them. Stick around to join the conversation and ask Adam your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.
Key Insights
-
•
60-90% of product ideas do not improve intended metrics, causing waste and burnout.
-
•
Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field exemplifies pushing forward without feedback, which can lead to failure in today’s environment.
-
•
Good strategy consists of diagnosis of the problem, a clear guiding policy, and coherent actions aligned to it.
-
•
Repeated incongruence—continuously reassessing incentives and data—strengthens decision-making muscles vital for pivots.
-
•
Building trust through recognition, challenge stress, discretion, and vulnerability is key to politically safe change.
-
•
Moving fast requires limiting options through predefined language and focusing on reversible, coin-flip decisions.
-
•
Being data-informed means using data to inform decisions, not blindly driving them; ignoring gut and context can be fatal (e.g., Challenger disaster).
-
•
Sensing metrics are time-bound, contextual, tied to decisions, and linked back to strategy—unlike traditional feature-focused roadmaps.
-
•
Stopping, pivoting, and investing early are essential decisions teams must iterate on to avoid sunk cost fallacy.
-
•
A clear story anchored in company culture with a villain (problem) helps communicate strategy and build trust for decision-making.
Notable Quotes
"60 to 90% of our ideas do not improve the metrics they were intended to improve."
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, said Mike Tyson."
"Feature roadmaps are bad because over time coherent actions become noise."
"Being data informed is not data driven—blindly following data can kill you, like the Challenger explosion."
"Stop, pivot, or invest early—these are the survival metric decisions that save companies."
"Trust is built by recognizing excellence, inducing challenge stress, giving discretion, and showing vulnerability."
"Most decisions are coin flip decisions—easily reversible and should be treated as defaults."
"You have to ask, what are we deciding, and what are we quitting, on a regular basis."
"If you’re not investing or quitting something, what is the point of having a strategy?"
"Repetition, representation, and association are the keys to great theater and great product development."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"I thought, maybe now is the time for change, maybe designers should code—maybe the better question in 2025 is should I code."
John DonmoyerShipping your code generation experiments to production
June 11, 2025
"AI prototypes can get lost on Slack because they're not always collaborative or integrated yet."
Shipra Kayan Robert Kortenoeven Eileen TangEmerging principles for using AI in Design: What the product design team at Miro has learned from deeply integrating AI in their workflow
June 11, 2025
"We introduced 'go-to' people, like account managers, responsible for particular business areas to maintain relationships."
Catherine BlizzardUsing Integrated Insight to Drive Growth
March 10, 2022
"If you fix the problems for marginalized communities, you really fix them for everyone."
Irina Tikhonova Kari DietrichSmall Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement
December 9, 2021
"For scientists, the cost of being wrong is very high, while designers iterate constantly, embracing failure as part of the process."
Victor Lombardi Ted Booth HK Dunston Andrew OtwellBridging Design and Climate Science
February 14, 2024
"Maintaining a research repository often requires 100% manual participation from researchers, which can be hard to enforce."
Brigette Metzler Dana ChrisfieldResearch Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
August 27, 2020
"Journaling your stress triggers helps you become self-aware and anticipate stress responses rather than fight them."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Uday Gajendar Dr. Dawn Emerick Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSWLeading through the long tail of trauma
July 13, 2022
"A Slack bot that sends random customer quotes encourages ongoing learning and discovery."
Crystal YanBuilding a Customer-Centric Culture
March 30, 2020
"White people are not the problem. White supremacy culture is the problem."
Spencer L. A. StultzWhy Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives
October 4, 2023
