Loved all of this but the post left me hanging! :) How should people measure the impact they bring? What are some of your suggestions for the different initiatives in the ecosystem and how they should measure if they are working or not?
It's curious that when I ask people who are promoting an ecosystem building initiative "Is it working?" they nearly always answer with another question: "How can I measure it?".
The implication, I guess, is that measurement is hard and attribution is even harder and so the question I was asking is impossible.
The four questions I posed in this post are the best starting point I can offer.
Rather than jumping directly to measurement just ask: Who is this for? What problem do those people have? How do I address that problem? Often these questions will reveal some obvious things to track and measure, and point to milestones you can use to show that you're on track, even where there is a leap of faith required to get to the eventual destination.
(These are the same questions we expect founders to ask about their market, right? Who is the target customer? What value do you provide? How do you reach them? etc.)
To quote Seth Godin, just asking "But, how will you know?" opens the door to a conversation about what (and who) it's actually for.
Loved all of this but the post left me hanging! :) How should people measure the impact they bring? What are some of your suggestions for the different initiatives in the ecosystem and how they should measure if they are working or not?
Good question,
It's curious that when I ask people who are promoting an ecosystem building initiative "Is it working?" they nearly always answer with another question: "How can I measure it?".
The implication, I guess, is that measurement is hard and attribution is even harder and so the question I was asking is impossible.
The four questions I posed in this post are the best starting point I can offer.
Rather than jumping directly to measurement just ask: Who is this for? What problem do those people have? How do I address that problem? Often these questions will reveal some obvious things to track and measure, and point to milestones you can use to show that you're on track, even where there is a leap of faith required to get to the eventual destination.
(These are the same questions we expect founders to ask about their market, right? Who is the target customer? What value do you provide? How do you reach them? etc.)
To quote Seth Godin, just asking "But, how will you know?" opens the door to a conversation about what (and who) it's actually for.
https://seths.blog/2021/05/but-how-will-you-know/