Be careful when optimizing something you can easily measure

It's easy to measure clicks on a website, and reasonbly simple to optimize for clicks. But clicks don't make you money.

It's easy to measure revenue, and not too hard to optimize for it. But that leaves out customer loyalty and satisfaction, cost of returns, operational costs, employee satisfaction.

The products and service providers who offer you metrics are incentivized to select the ones that are easy to measure, and present them as important.

Maybe the easy-to-measure just happens to coincide with the worth-your-attention. Or maybe you're being presented with a Cornelian dilemma, a.k.a. your choice of pimp.

If all the metrics and dashboards went away, and you had to build everything from scratch, what would you want to keep track of?

It might be "people discussing us in group chats," or "how many people have bookmarked our website," or "general vibes," something else you can't really measure.

Consider the possibility that keeping an eye on the unmeasurable things you care about is better than rigorously tracking the things that happen to sit on a dashboard.