There is a common issue of over-optimizing the metrics in business, which can damage the whole system.
Doing the wrong thing efficiently is actually worse than doing the right thing badly.
– Rory Sutherland
There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we... See more
In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User .
People who insist that every product decision should be metrics-driven would also have to logically admit that theirs will be the first job to get automated by AI.