On his eponymous podcast, Lex Fridman interviewed Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos: “I have a saying which is:
When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected.
It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.
If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.
An early example of this, we had metrics that showed our customers were waiting less than 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get phone customer service. But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally it seemed longer than that… I would call customer service myself.
One day we’re in a meeting and we get to this metric in the deck. And the guy who leads customer service is defending the metric. And I said, OK, let’s call. I picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number… and we just waited in silence… It was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think.
It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren’t measuring the right thing.
And that set of a chain of events where we started measuring it right.
But you have to seek truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. And you have to get people’s attention to buy into it. And they have to get energized around really fixing things.”
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