HiPPO stands for HIghest Paid Person's Opinion, a trait of dysfunctional culture, in which power politics trumps data.

The concept seems to originate from Netscape's CEO and the acronym exists since 2006, according HiPPO FAQ: http://bitly.com/HIPPOExplained

Why are you trying to track us? Please post non-tracking links https://exp-platform.com/Pages/HiPPO_explained.aspx

Any time I see a bitly link like that, I always copy rather than click and add a + to the end. I should make an extension to do it on hover I guess.

Good tip on adding the ‘+’ to the end. Thanks! To anyone wondering, adding the plus (when logged in to Bitly) displays an info page with the referrers (refererers) and locations by country.

And where the link goes to, obviously. No idea if this counts toward the Bitly link open rate.

My pleasure! Two tiny points

1) don’t need to be logged in for the + to work

2) I’ve not seen it increment the clicks by visiting the + stats page, but can’t speak authoritatively on that.

Sorry, I was just trying to respect the FAQ author's method to keep a stable URL (see the bottom of the FAQ).

What’s that stand for? I’m guessing something along the lines of:

High Importance Person Pushing Own (desires??)?

As others have said it means "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" but as a little extra.

It is usually used when a company has no actual data to work on and therefore goes with the "obvious" as defined by "the boss" (Hippo).

Not that it is necessarily true. There could be lots of data that some people are not aware of and that only senior people are privy to, but if that is not shared with the team developing the software then that is in itself not a great sign.

Nah, HIPPO works perfectly well in "data-driven" companies: the highest paid person proclaims what the data is supposed to tell, and then lots of data "science" happens to make the data show exactly that.

HIghest Paid Person's Opinion

I think it stands for _Highest Paid Person's Opinion_

highest paid person's opinion