🏢 ICYMI

Estimated read time: 3 minutes 50 seconds

We were in our quarterly planning meeting, and I watched it happen in real-time.

My product team had spent the last hour dissecting our engagement metrics. Weekly active users. Monthly active users. Feature adoption rates. We were planning a major product overhaul, and everyone was laser-focused on one question: which metrics should we move?

Not once did anyone ask: what problem are we actually solving for our users?

This is the metric trap, and I see product teams fall into it constantly.

Here's what happens when you start with quantitative goals: your entire product strategy warps around them.

You're launching a redesign? Better make sure it increases weekly active users. Building a new feature? Track how it impacts monthly actives. Every decision gets filtered through the lens of: will this move our numbers?

The problem isn't measuring things. Metrics matter. The problem is letting metrics define your mission before you've defined your value proposition.

When you do this, three things break:

User experience takes a back seat. Design decisions that would genuinely help users get vetoed because they might hurt a metric. I've seen teams keep confusing UI elements because removing them would temporarily drop engagement. The metric became more important than the user.

Strategic flexibility dies. Once you've committed to moving a specific number, your thinking narrows. You optimize for that metric instead of staying open to what users actually need. You miss pivots. You ignore signals. You're playing the wrong game because you defined the scoreboard too early.

You solve for the metric, not the user. This is the most dangerous one. Your team starts pattern-matching on "what drives engagement" instead of "what creates value." You end up building features that goose your numbers but don't actually make your product better.

I see this hit two groups especially hard:

Junior PMs following advice from the internet. Every product management blog preaches the gospel of data-driven decision making and SMART goals. Set measurable targets! Track your KPIs! Be objective! So they do exactly that, and wonder why their products feel soulless.

Early-stage companies (and anyone navigating major shifts). When you're still finding product-market fit, or when your space is being disrupted by something like AI, the game is fluid. Locking into specific metrics too early is like trying to navigate with last year's map. You need flexibility, not rigidity.

Start with a different question: What problem are we solving for our users?

Not "what metric do we want to move" but "what value do we want to create."

Look at Linear. Karri Saarinen and his team have built one of the most loved products in tech by obsessing over craft and feel, not engagement metrics. They prioritize polish. They care about how the product feels to use. They sweat the details of the experience. And the result? A product people genuinely love using, with growth that speaks for itself.

That's the model:

Talk to your users. Qualitative signal matters more than you think. Five deep conversations will teach you more than five dashboards. Learn what's actually broken. Understand what they're trying to accomplish.

Trust your intuition. If you've spent real time in your space, you've built pattern recognition that data can't capture. That intuition - grounded in user empathy and market understanding - is valuable. Use it.

Focus on design and experience. Make the product genuinely better to use. Solve real friction. Create delight. These things are harder to measure but they're what actually matters.

Let metrics inform, not dictate. Use data to validate your direction and catch problems. But don't let it define your direction in the first place.

Here's the irony: when you focus on creating genuine user value instead of moving metrics, your metrics usually get better anyway.

Because engagement isn't an end goal. It's a byproduct of building something people actually want to use.

Your users don't wake up thinking "I hope I increase their weekly active users today." They wake up with problems to solve. Give them a product that solves those problems beautifully, and the numbers will follow.

The metrics aren't the mission. They're just the scoreboard.