Building something no one else can measure

Hire and retain best teachers → Measure test performance → “Teaching the test”

Zappos optimized to make the return-experience a delight and part of shopping when every other retailer was trying to drive down returns.

But you, as an outsider, you can do better. If you can figure out this this blind spot , you can build something that captures a space that the existing incumbent can’t go after easily. 

For example, in terms of what designers wanted, what they built/measured and what they unintentionally caused:

• Quality journalism → Measure Clicks → Creation of click-bait content

These metrics never really capture the underlying human emotion or behavior they are trying to measure. To make things more interesting, they almost always create secondary behavior which makes the metric go up but in a way the system designers didn’t anticipate or want.

Since it is near impossible to perfectly measure human behavior, most large teams/products pick a proxy metric to measure underlying behavior. For example - ‘clicks’ are a proxy for “did I read this?” and “will I buy this product sometime in the future?”, ‘time spent’ is a proxy for “did I enjoy this content?” and NPS is often a substitut