Week 12 Day 7: Assignment: Share One Business Metric Your Team Has Never Seen

Choose one number from the Value Pyramid you built last week that your team has never seen. Revenue per customer, monthly churn rate, infrastructure cost per user, customer acquisition cost -- any metric that would change how they think about their work. Share it in your next team meeting and ask two questions: 'Did you know this number?' and 'Does it change how you think about what we are working on?'

Here is how to make this exercise effective rather than performative. First, pick a metric that connects directly to the team's work. Do not share the CEO's compensation or the company's total debt -- pick something your team can influence. If your team builds the product, share churn rate or customer acquisition cost. If your team manages infrastructure, share cost-per-user or uptime-to-revenue correlation. Second, present the number with context. 'Our monthly churn rate is 6.2%. That means we lose roughly one in sixteen customers every month. For our current customer base, that is about twelve thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue walking out the door.' Third, ask for reactions before offering solutions. The goal is not to lecture your team -- it is to invite them into the conversation. Fourth, commit to sharing this metric regularly. One-time transparency is theater. Recurring transparency is culture. Connect this back to Week 11's Value Pyramid -- the metric you share should map to one of the three layers, making the pyramid real rather than theoretical.

The single-metric sharing approach draws on what Heath and Heath (2007) call the 'power of concreteness' in 'Made to Stick' -- abstract concepts become actionable when anchored to specific, tangible numbers. Research by Epley and Gilovich (2006) on anchoring effects demonstrates that a single concrete number can reshape subsequent judgment and decision-making, even when the number is recognized as arbitrary. In this context, the deliberate choice of a business metric creates a persistent anchor that the team will reference in future prioritization discussions. The instruction to share the metric 'regularly' rather than once reflects Ebbinghaus's (1885) spacing effect -- information presented repeatedly at intervals is retained and applied more effectively than information presented once. The two-question format ('Did you know this?' and 'Does it change how you think?') leverages what Socratic pedagogy calls the 'elenctic method' -- using questions to surface assumptions and create cognitive dissonance. When a team member says 'I did not know that' and then 'yes, that changes my perspective,' they have not received information -- they have reconstructed their mental model, which produces deeper and more durable learning than passive receipt.