(First created: 05/10/2024 |Personal Opinion)

I’m always fascinated by how words come into being and amazed by how they convey the “divine reason implicit in the cosmos, order it and give it form and meaning”. Case in point, as I reflect on the guiding stars I follow at work that transcend the different industries I was in, the varieties of problems I solved, and the various roles I played, six words rise into salience. And, my God[1], they all start with the letter ‘E’!

The Experience-Efficiency spectrum

On the vertical axes is the juxtaposition of the first two ‘E’s:

  • E1: Experience. Paramount of all the ‘E’s. Applicable to all parties you interact with:
    • Customers. External and internal.
    • Stakeholders. Friends or foe.
    • Yourself. You must attend to your own experience before others.
  • E2: Efficiency.
    • Performance efficiency. Low latency, responsive…
    • Cognitive efficiency. Easy to understand, easy to use, highly productive…
    • Cost efficiency. Less compute, storage, humans…
    • Structural efficiency. Simple architecture, less complexity…
    • Operational efficiency. Obeservability, tracibility, auditability…

The Efficacy-Effectiveness spectrum

Horizontally are the two ‘E’s I keep in mind for every tactical decision I had to make for every feature, apps or initiative:

  • E3: Efficacy. At the onset of an initiative, I ask: will it work, under ideal situations?
  • E4: Effectiveness. Before greenlighting a feature into production, I ask: how it performs, under real world settings?

The Experimental core

Experiences, efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness, each of the first four ‘E’s has their own metrics that needed to be measured. When they’re conflicting with each other, as almost always the case, the equilibrium point which delivers the biggest impacts needs to be optimized. All these concerns call for the design, conducting and analysis of experiments.

The Empathy foundation

The first five ‘E’s are color coded as blue, indicating the cold, objective and scientific side of the 6E Way. The last ‘E’ is coded as E0 and the color purple to emphasize the importance of the humane side of the 6E Way.

  • E0: Empathy. If you consider yourself a human, always have empathy in your psyche, at all times, for any other humans you come into contact. With empathy comes compassion. With compassion comes good will. With good will comes reciprocal good will. The virtuous circle ensues…

Getting personal

The 6E Way also helps in other settings. A personal example: I used to yell at my eleven year old son and managed to rid of the bad behavior, after the realization that:

  • Me yelling is certainly NOT a good experience for my son, evident from the tears in his eyes.
  • Yelling is not only ineffective at but detrimental to the parenting goal I want to achieve.
  • Root causes of my anger are almost always the lack of empathy for my son.
  • I experimented before finding the optimal way of coaching my son.

Getting crazy

Could the 6E Way be the underpinning of a philosophy? a movement? a religion? While I see no downside of more people following it, I don’t know if it’s too crazy an idea.

But let me tell you what’s crazy: to spawn a business out of a specific Cartesian coordinate system, a single Venn diagram, or a popular book. For this reason, any elaboration and commercialization of the 6E Way are forbidden. I can assure you that there won’t be 6E books, classes, workshops or coaches. The 6E Way is an empty container which you need to fill in. I want you to stare at the 6E diagram right here on this page, keep chanting the names of the six ‘E’s, loudly or silently, until you internalize and etch it in your heart and on your mind : )

Appendix

Outcome vs Engagement vs Intervention

Although business outcomes should ideally be favorably affected by user interventions, to get closer to the truth, they should be defined, measured and analyzed independently without the knowledge of interventions. Customers as the conduit between the two are the ultimate force field warper that makes the path from intervention to outcome a dynamic and unpredictable one. The only way out is to measure, measureand measure!

  • Many interventions with good offline metrics perform poorly online with real customers.
  • Good online metrics not necessarily be able to move bottom line business outcomes.

Some examples of the three in different domains are listed below:

Healthcare Advertisement Financial Services
Intervention Prescribed medications Display ads to users AI generated answers to customer question
Engagement Does the patient take the medications? Does the user click the ad? Does the rep use the AI generated answers?
Outcome Patients healthier? User place order? Reps handle more customer calls? More customer satisfaction?

Outcome vs Benchmark

Benchmarks which are metrics derived from artificial, offline, sampled and idealized “realities” should not be trusted blindly. Outcomes, on the other hand, ugly maybe but is real:

Business owners who have the wisdom to demand for and the courage to face the real outcomes should be praised effusively. Because only in them lies the hope of improving on the outcomes.

References

  1. A Comprehensive Guide to Profit and Loss Assessments

Notes

[1] I say this as an atheist. Not believing in God doesn’t prevent me from being deeply religious. It’s just that my religion is Truth. If you press me on who is the God in my religion, I’d say probably the Great Unknown. Unknown knows everything, Unknown is all powerful, Unknown is all loving… ⤴

The 6E Way