The Comfort Metric
The Comfort Metric is the term coined by Shayne Fitz-Coy in 2025 for a number a struggling company optimizes because it is easy to measure rather than because it matters.
The Comfort Metric in practice
Call centers measure call times when the thing that matters is what happened to the caller. Warehouses measure picks per hour when the number that matters is accuracy.
Terms Related to The Comfort Metric
First-Person Data Beats Top-Down Data · The Hidden Power Structure · Unit economics · All of the glossary