Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.
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I watch a lot of sports. Grew up playing them. They were always on in my house, a backdrop to every holiday, different teams and vintages discussed like distant relatives. Sports is drama — there is no script — and it changes year to year.
So does the scorebug.
A scorebug is the graphic overlay on a broadcast that displays the score, the clock, the teams. It seems simple, but someone designs it. Someone decides what information matters most in this moment. During the Olympics, scorebugs feature flags — nationality is the story. This year’s NFL broadcasts prominently feature team mascots over names — identity and brand are the story. The scorebug orients millions of viewers on what to focus on and why.
Products have scorebugs too. So do careers. Someone is always deciding what numbers to put on screen. The question is whether it’s you or someone else.
At Betterment, customers had chosen their own scorebug — and it was grading the wrong thing. Deposits surged when the market was up. They slowed when the market was down. People were evaluating us the same way: deposit $10k, wait 90 days, check if they had more or less.
The problem? That test graded the market, not us.
We could build the most sophisticated rebalancing algorithms, harvest tax losses automatically, optimize portfolios around the clock. None of it mattered if the only question customers asked was “did my number go up?”
This wasn’t broken yet. During a bull market, deposits were strong. But winter was coming. It always is. The best time to fix this was while we had room to experiment. It was also the hardest time to make the case, because nothing felt urgent.
So we started seeding a different scorecard.
We reframed our value around the work we did constantly on your behalf: rebalancing, tax efficiency, portfolio adjustments. We pulled that language forward into landing pages, onboarding flows, and regular emails. “Here’s what we did for you this month. Here are the trades we executed. Here’s the tax loss we harvested.”
Without this, customers had a single metric: more money or less. We gave them a larger scorecard. One that reflected what we actually did well, not just what the market happened to do.
The Loudest Metric Wins
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you don’t define how you’re evaluated, people will default to the most obvious metric. Not because they’re lazy or unfair, but because evaluating anything is work. After all, people care way less about your product than you do. People reach for the simplest measure available. At Betterment, that was account balance. Easy to check, easy to compare, completely outside our control.
Staying vague about your goals feels safer. If you don’t commit to specific metrics, you can’t be held to them. But vagueness doesn’t protect you. It just means someone else picks the test. And they’ll pick the one that’s easiest to grade, not the one that captures what you actually do.
You don’t avoid being evaluated by staying quiet. You just lose control of the scorecard.
When the Game Becomes the Metric
I saw a more dramatic version of this at Etsy.
When I arrived, search results were sorted by recency. Sellers paid a small fee to list items for four months. Savvy sellers figured out that relisting early would bump them back to the top. It worked, and Etsy collected more fees. This premature relisting drove a non-trivial amount of company revenue.
But the more sellers adopted this tactic, the less effective it became for everyone. Sellers who couldn’t afford to constantly relist found themselves trapped at the bottom of search results. We hadn’t designed it this way — we’d simply given sellers a tool, and the savviest ones turned it from an advantage into a requirement.
Winter was coming again. Finance and Product were both nervous, but getting alignment to change something driving revenue wasn’t easy. We had to move while the numbers still looked good.
We improved search relevancy so gaming recency mattered less. We introduced promoted listings that sellers could purchase. And critically, we gave sellers analytics to see how their promotions actually performed.
Before, sellers had a gut feeling: “relisting seems to help.” We replaced the hunch with a scorecard. Real data on what was working and what wasn’t. We didn’t just change the product. We changed how sellers evaluated their own success.
The Test That Wasn’t About the Decision
The hardest version of this isn’t product strategy. It’s leadership.
A client I coach — let’s call him David — came to me after his first quarter in a senior role. He’d made some deeply unpopular calls. Restructured teams. Let people go. The kind of decisions that ripple through hallways and Slack channels for weeks.
“Everyone hates me,” he said. Not self-pity — just an observation. Town halls had a new silence. People asked polite questions but nothing real.
He didn’t try to convince anyone the decisions were popular. He didn’t argue that people should feel differently than they felt. Instead, we worked on defining a different scorecard.
He told his team he was there for the long haul. He asked them to evaluate him in six months. Not on whether they liked what he’d done. Not on whether they were still upset. On whether the company was in a better position.
Six months later, it was. People could see the results, even if they hadn’t loved the path.
David understood something important: after a hard decision, the loudest metric is pain. If you let that be the scorecard, you’ll fail it every time. His job wasn’t to eliminate the pain. It was to give people a different test to grade him on.
This isn’t just a C-suite move. Anyone making a bet on themselves faces the same dynamic: a PM going up for promotion, a product leader pitching a risky roadmap, a founder asking investors for patience. You’re asking people to believe in a future they can’t see yet. The loudest metric — what’s visible today — will win unless you seed a better one.
The Scorecard That Shaped the Roadmap
Seeding a scorecard doesn’t guarantee the outcome you want.
At Betterment, deposits didn’t surge after we reframed our value. Money is personal and irrational. People don’t always behave the way you hope, even when you’ve given them a better way to evaluate you.
But the reframing still mattered. It solidified our focus.
We started building for what customers actually needed during bear markets. We launched a savings account that let people keep money with us without exposing it to market volatility. Money doesn’t disappear in downturns — it just moves. In 2022, money market funds saw record inflows as investors fled equities for safety. The money was looking for a home. We gave customers somewhere to go.
Today, over 20% of Betterment’s assets, more than $14 billion, sit in cash products. The scorecard we seeded for customers ended up shaping our roadmap. We stopped measuring ourselves solely on deposits and started measuring ourselves on whether we were the right home for someone’s financial life, up market or down.
That’s the unexpected upside: the scorecard you create for others often clarifies what you should be building in the first place.
Seeding the Scorecard
The tactics vary, but the principle doesn’t: you have to plant the seed early, before people start grading. And the scorecard has to be real. If it’s not auditable, if others can’t verify the work, it’s not a scorecard. It’s spin.
Six months before a big launch, a critical milestone, or a moment of evaluation, share your goals broadly with key partners. Be specific about what you’re optimizing for. Ask them to keep you honest.
Because here’s what most people forget: you can fail a hundred tests you never defined as yours. The metrics exist whether you name them or not. Winter always comes. The only question is whether you’ve seeded the scorecard before it arrives.