There was a point a few years ago where you could not see a single piece of user-generated content above the fold on the reddit home page. A bunch of teams had jockeyed for having their little carousels and banners put on top, and of course, metrics were always cited.
I left a screenshot in slack and it ended up causing a couple of teams to have to roll back their widgets, but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent.
> but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent
Always look to the decision maker's incentives and you'll almost always discover why things are the way they are. And often, to your point, there's an aspect of tunnel vision associated with it because considering the bigger picture is difficult as a company grows and becomes more complex and creates friction in achieving goals.
Ultimately, this is the purpose of senior leadership. But the Peter Principal really begins to kick in at that level and the truth is, many senior leaders are in over their head and are unable to materialize the broader strategy and understand how their various units are affecting it. So we end up with crappy products.
The best metric is the end of year bonus, tided to yearly total company financial results, but that only gets measured once per year. I can measure many things on every transaction, but how they in total work out to my end of year bonus and paycheck are much harder to see.
Of course if my bonus is some small KPI I can optimize that at the expense of overall performance.
It seems like every company goes through some version of this. At Twitter there was a channel called #ios-six-bars or something like that that started when an engineer posted a screenshot of the home timeline with six bars of things on it, all from jockeying teams trying to grab a spot on that page: Home, Spaces, all the new features just had to be thrown in the face of somebody who probably just wanted to read some tweets. Discussions were had, product cohesion was brought up, then things went quiet for a bit. Until someone posted a new screenshot a couple months later with seven bars on the screen.
I left a screenshot in slack and it ended up causing a couple of teams to have to roll back their widgets, but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent.