Somewhere along the way, we replaced the mission, our outcomes, with the metric. What gets our attention are the scoreboards and dashboards, instead of what we are trying to achieve.
It’s happened gradually, disguised as data-driven management. We built dashboards. We set targets. We tracked performance. And in that process, we got lost.
The metric was never supposed to be the point. It was supposed to tell us whether we were on the path to achieving our goals, executing the mission. Instead, it became the focal point. We forgot about the outcomes and the mission entirely.
Watch what managers focus on in discussions. Look at their dashboards.
In marketing, the conversation is about MQLs, impressions, intent signals, click-through rates, cost per lead, and social engagement. But where are the conversations about how well we’re creating customer understanding? Are buyers better informed, better equipped to make good decisions? That’s the mission. Instead, we focus on activities, outreach, opens, optimizing signals, and impressions that may have nothing to do with whether anyone is being helped.
In sales, the obsession is with activity metrics: calls made, emails sent, meetings booked, demos conducted, proposals sent, pipeline coverage ratios, and forecast accuracy. These numbers dominate every review, coaching conversation, and performance discussion. But how often do we do deep dives into actual deals and coach sellers on strategy? When did we last ask whether salespeople are helping customers solve real problems and how they are creating genuine value?
That’s the mission. Helping customers solve their problems is what produces POs. Supporting them in the effective use of the solution is what drives retention and renewal. Instead, we focus on activity numbers while deals slip, customers disengage, and we fail to achieve our goals.
In customer service, we’ve built elaborate measurement systems around handle time, first-contact resolution, ticket closure rates, and NPS. We’ve gotten efficient at hitting each of these. What we miss is whether customers are actually successful. That’s why we see high buyer regret and customers not renewing. Those outcomes are the mission, but they don’t fit in a dashboard.
Why do we accept email open rates of 0.1%, win rates of 15-25%, fewer than 40% of sellers meeting quota? The metric doesn’t solve these problems. It doesn’t address what’s actually failing. It just reports what we are measuring.
There’s a principle economists call Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The moment you make a metric the thing people optimize for, they focus on the metric, not the original reason it was put in place. The measure decouples us from what we’re actually trying to achieve.
We focus on pipeline coverage and forget pipeline quality. We measure calls, emails, and demos while the outcomes they’re supposed to produce plummet. Marketing is doing their job, hitting MQL targets, even though sales ignores them because they are useless.
Sending thousands of AI-generated outreach emails satisfies the goal even when response rates are fractions of a percent. A 3X pipeline feeding a 15-20% win rate doesn’t mean we’re set up to succeed, it means we’re set up to fail. Customer service closes tickets without resolving the underlying problem, but first-contact “resolution” is what gets measured. We’ve built organizations full of people who are very good at hitting numbers, but confused about why the business isn’t performing.
Metrics create an illusion of control. When we see a number and our attainment against it, we feel like we understand what’s happening. When performance falls short, the instinct is to increase the metric, more calls, more demos, more meetings, more emails, more leads.
We never ask why performance keeps declining, whether we’re measuring the right things, or whether something fundamental needs to change. We put sellers exceeding their quota on PIPs because their activity metrics are insufficient.
We also use metrics as a form of self-protection. When challenged on results, we point to the dashboard. Leads and activity are up. Pipeline is at 3X. The metrics are fine. We know how to play that game: drive leads up while quality plummets, hit pipeline numbers while win rates fall.
The dashboard is no longer a diagnostic. It’s a defense or an excuse. Along the way, we’ve stopped trusting judgment completely. Rather than developing people who understand the business deeply enough to adapt and figure things out, we built systems that tell people exactly what to do and then measure whether they did it. Compliance substitutes for thinking.
Metrics don’t tell you whether prospects and customers trust you. They don’t tell you whether the last conversation created enough value for the customer to move forward with confidence. We know someone downloaded a piece of content, but not whether it helped them understand anything. Our service metrics tell us we moved a customer off a queue, not that we solved their problem.
And none of them causes us to ask the questions that actually matter: What do we have to change to increase engagement? What would it take to improve win rates? Could we redesign our approach and achieve our goals in fewer interactions?
We focus on metrics because focusing on the mission and outcomes is harder.
Measurement matters. Knowing whether you’re making progress is essential. The problem isn’t the metric, it’s that we’ve let the metric displace the mission entirely. A metric is supposed to tell you whether you’re on track and, when you’re not, point toward what needs to change. That’s all it was ever supposed to do.
The game isn’t the scoreboard. It’s what’s actually happening on the field and what we are doing to achieve our goals. The question isn’t what our dashboards show. It’s whether we are achieving our mission.
Afterword: This is a great AI based discussion of this post. Toward the end, they add a fascinating view that I hadn’t considered. They discuss the impact of AI in amplifying the problem. Enjoy!
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