The Metric You Celebrate Is the Metric You Game
Pick the number you put on the big screen carefully, because your team will move heaven and earth to make it go up, and they will not be gentle about the collateral damage. This is not cynicism. It is just how incentives work. People optimize what gets celebrated, and they optimize it including all the side effects you forgot to mention.
Tell a team that signups are the goal, and you will get signups. You will also get a checkout flow that buries the cancel button, a free tier that quietly trains users to never pay, and a marketing budget aimed at the cheapest, least-retained traffic you can find. Every one of those moves makes the celebrated number climb. None of them makes the business healthier. The team did exactly what you asked.
The mechanism is old enough to have a name. Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The moment a metric carries reward, it stops describing reality and starts describing effort spent manipulating it. This is not a failure of character. Your best people are the ones most capable of gaming a number, because gaming a number is just optimization pointed at the wrong thing.
So the choice of which number to celebrate is one of the highest-leverage decisions you make, and most teams make it casually. They pick whatever is easy to measure, or whatever the dashboard happened to surface, and then they act surprised when behavior bends around it in ugly ways. The metric was never neutral. It was an instruction.
The defense is to pair every target with a guardrail. If you celebrate activation, guard retention. If you celebrate revenue, guard refund and complaint rates. If you celebrate engagement, guard the unsubscribe rate and the support queue. The guardrail does not have to move up. It just has to not collapse. Its job is to make the cheap, destructive shortcuts visible before they become culture.
Choose the celebrated number to be as close as you can to the thing you actually want. Not a proxy for value, value itself, or the nearest honest stand-in. The further your headline metric sits from real customer benefit, the more room there is for the gap to get filled with games. Closeness to truth is your best protection.
And watch what happens when a number suddenly jumps. A clean win usually shows up across several metrics at once, because real value tends to be correlated. A gamed win shows up in exactly one place, the celebrated one, while everything around it stays flat or sags. That divergence is the tell. Learn to read it.
You will get the behavior you reward. So be very sure the thing you are rewarding is the thing you actually want.