Glossary
Metric owner
A metric owner is the single person who answers for a row every week, which is not the same as the person who happens to have access to the report. The owner is whoever can change the number. A row owned by two people is owned by nobody, and the week it goes red you get an explanation from each of them and a decision from neither.
01
Why one name per row, and never two
Every Scorecard row carries exactly one name, and the owner is the one who reads it out. That is the whole mechanism. Ownership does not mean doing all the work behind the number. It means being the person the team looks at when the row misses, and the person who brings the issue to the meeting when it is about to.
Shared ownership is the most polite way to end up with none. It usually appears because nobody wants to embarrass a colleague, and it produces a board where every red row comes with a story about another department. Putting one name against each row is uncomfortable for a fortnight and then becomes the reason the meeting gets shorter.
Worked example: A wholesale distributor had on-time shipping owned by operations and sales together, on the grounds that both affected it. Red weeks produced a discussion about promised dates and warehouse capacity, and no change. Giving the row to the operations lead, with a separate row for orders promised inside lead time owned by sales, ended the argument in one meeting.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Data; kpi.org/kpi-basics
KPI
A KPI is a number a leadership team has agreed to run the business by: one owner, a goal written next to it, and a slot on the weekly agenda.
02Target
A target is the number written beside a measure that says what a good week looks like: twelve proposals, ninety-five percent on time, cash collected.
03Cadence
Cadence is how often a number gets read out and answered for, and it is a property of the meeting rather than of the metric itself.
04KPIs and EOS®: build a Scorecard that predicts results
Where KPIs fit inside EOS: the weekly Scorecard, 5 to 15 measurables, one owner each, and a simple picker to draft yours by industry in a few minutes.
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