Is your scorecard measuring work or results?

Hi Everyone,

When you review your leadership team's performance, are you looking at what they completed or what they accomplished? Completed means the work got done. Accomplished means something in the business changed because of it.

Your exec scorecard should be measuring the second, but it's easy for the first to creep in. We put together a quick audit to find and fix the weak spots.

How to spot the problem

A benchmark of 2,473 real startup OKRs found that the first word of each metric predicted team performance.

Teams that started their goals with activity verbs like 'launch,' 'build,' 'ship,' and 'deliver' underperformed.

Teams that started with outcome verbs like "increase," "reduce," and "grow" did better.

But "Reduce new-customer churn from 8% to 5%" is a result that forces everyone to own what happens after the launch, not just whether it shipped.

Run this on your own scorecard

Pull up the metrics for each member of your leadership team.

1. Start with the verb test: Read the first word of each metric. "Ship," "build," "create," "deliver" are activities. "Increase," "reduce," "improve," "grow" are outcomes. Every activity metric on the list should either be rewritten as an outcome or removed.
2. Then count them: David Sacks, former PayPal COO and GP at Craft Ventures, caps his exec scorecards at five to seven metrics each, with 30 rows total across the company. You can't realistically review more than ten per person every week. And a metric nobody reviews stops mattering fast.
3. Cut anything that never comes up in your weekly operating review.
4. Last, pair your important metrics: Gokul Rajaram, who built ad products at Google and Facebook, puts a second metric next to every primary one. Revenue gets paired with margin, user growth with engagement quality, etc. The second metric tells you whether the first one is being hit in a way that's good for the business.

None of this works without a weekly review

Kevin Fishner ran scorecard systems for over a thousand people as Chief of Staff at HashiCorp. His conclusion was that OKRs only work when there's a regular review attached.

GoCardless, the UK fintech, rebuilt their goal system around weekly visibility. Goal adoption went from 62% to 100%. Company confidence went from 46% to 75%. Revenue grew 38% year over year. The scorecard redesign helped, but the weekly review is what changed the results.

Try this today

We built a companion spreadsheet with 40+ activity-to-outcome rewrites across every function — sales, product, engineering, people, operations, finance, and more. Each row shows the activity metric, the outcome version, and which role it applies to.

There's a blank audit tab where you can run this on your own team's scorecard, and an AI prompt you can paste into Claude or ChatGPT that will walk you through each metric and ask the right questions when the rewrite isn't obvious.

Go deeper

👉 David Sacks: The Cadence — How to Operate a SaaS Startup – the original essay on weekly metrics, quarterly OKRs, and the operating rhythm behind the 5-7 metric rule

👉 First Round Review: Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires – Kevin Fishner on how HashiCorp structures scorecards, reviews, and planning at scale

👉 OKRs Tool: We Analyzed 2,473 Startup OKRs – the benchmark behind the activity vs. outcome verb finding, with examples

👉 Lattice: How GoCardless "Makes It Happen" – the full GoCardless case study on goal adoption and performance redesign

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we're sharing a step-by-step guide to designing a paid sabbatical program, with benchmarks from Intel, HubSpot, and 37signals.

That's it for today!

P.S. Today's issue is worth forwarding to your team. The spreadsheet and AI prompt work without much setup – they can audit their own metrics in a few minutes.