I would add a root cause to this: KPIs are fine when treated as health indicators. You can deliver a feature, and then watch over a good period of time whether

I would add a root cause to this: KPIs are fine when treated as health indicators. You can deliver a feature, and then watch over a good period of time whether the health improves. This "good period of time" can be months, or for something that's intuitive – e.g. you're launching a feature to be on parity or enter a new market or catch up with a competitor – this can take YEARS for your customers to understand and move closer to your product. What backfires is, using KPIs as quarterly goals. Imagine this, you launch a feature and expect within the quarter that this feature is going to grab X% of your competitor market share (beautifully expressed as "increases X business by Y%"). This is where it starts to fall apart. Things that are human intuitive for the product (common sense market features, foundational work, new market launches) – will never get prioritized because they won't move a number in that quarter. Using KPIs as development cycle goals are destroying businesses. KPIs are fine as health indicators. The problem is, using KPIs as health indicators – works only with the kind of environment where: Teams after healthy discussions can trust and commit to delivering features – and somebody takes accountability for the KPIs asynchronously behind the scenes. Where a shepherd steps up and says, "I approved the features last year, I take responsibility if they all didn't change our trajectory, some did, some didn't". Today's adoption of KPIs is an "empowerment" trend, where managers figured out – teams are delivering features and I'm answering KPIs, why do this roundabout, let me just pass on the entire KPIs to the team, problem solved! "I forwarded the KPIs to my team and they committed to doing these features, I did my job, the team is not performing". The path to hell is paved with good intentions, but there are also nefarious habits.