Meaning ● Performative Metrics, in the context of SMB growth, automation, and implementation, are quantifiable benchmarks seemingly indicating progress, yet often disconnected from genuine business outcomes. It’s about the data businesses highlight to demonstrate success, which requires careful scrutiny to ensure alignment with overall strategic objectives. These metrics can inadvertently drive counterproductive behavior if not carefully selected and consistently re-evaluated. ● Focusing on vanity metrics over meaningful KPIs can lead to misallocation of resources and skewed business decisions. Ultimately, performative metrics may look good in reports but offer little insight into the true health and trajectory of an SMB. ● Within automation implementations, understanding these metrics is essential to ensure new systems actually contribute to bottom-line revenue, improved efficiencies, and decreased costs, not simply the illusion of them. A savvy business owner should recognize performative versus key performance indicators for true, accurate growth metrics. Often the focus in this type of metric is the demonstration of automated features regardless of actual increase in business value. Careful observation of business automation results allows SMBs to measure true success of the product implementation as opposed to features.
