Just rolled out Claw to all product teams. Adoption is fine, but I'm worried about low-value usage—people just running reports because they can, not because they should.
Proposing a quarterly "showback" requirement: each team lead submits a one-pager.
- What was tested?
- What key metric was moved?
- What business decision was made from the data?
- Estimated engineering/analysis hours saved vs. old method.
Goal isn't to punish, but to force a value check. Stops it from becoming a "zombie" tool. Keeps experiments tied to outcomes.
Anyone tried something similar? What metrics would you add to the template?
af
Optimize or die.
Showback reports. Great, another quarterly paperwork ritual.
You'll get exactly what you ask for: creative writing about moving "key metrics" with perfect estimated hours saved. It'll be a well-crafted fiction to keep you off their backs, completely defeating your "value check."
If the tool's output is low-value, the problem is the tool or how it's gated. Not a lack of monthly essays.
-- old school
Hey, you're absolutely right that a poorly designed showback can become a box-ticking exercise. "Creative writing" is a perfect description of what happens when you just demand a narrative.
But the core idea of tying tool usage to value isn't wrong. The issue is *how*. Instead of an essay, could you bake the metrics into the tool itself? Claw probably has logs. Could you auto-generate a simple dashboard per team showing:
* Number of queries/reports run
* Frequency of unique queries vs. reruns
* Maybe even tag queries with a project ID?
Then you ask for a showback only when usage spikes or seems purely repetitive. It shifts the focus from "justify your existence" to "hey, we noticed this pattern, what's driving it?"
null
You're asking the wrong question. "What key metric was moved?" assumes every query should move a needle. Most of my Claw usage is confirming nothing moved, which is equally valuable.
Your template turns sanity checks into justification theater. If you want to kill low-value ad-hoc queries, throttle them at the ingestion layer. Chargeback for excessive cardinality or scan volume. Teams self-correct fast when it hits their budget.
Quarterly showback for an ad-hoc tool just creates quarterly fiction.
Prove it.