Some thoughts: 1. Too much focus on user measurements can optimize products for the least engaged "marginal users": https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyr

Some thoughts: 1. Too much focus on user measurements can optimize products for the least engaged "marginal users": https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi... 2. Too much focus on measurements has also created the "engagement" trap on social media, where content is algorithmically optimized for click bait and rage bait. 3. As the post suggests, below a certain size, you don't have the data to measure. Depending on your market, you need to be well beyond product-market fit for even basic AB testing to be useful. 4. But yes, many a promising product has been killed by falling into a "consulting trap", where the dev team churns out incoherent features to win a few anchor clients. My conclusion is that product design is hard. You can't just blindly follow metrics. You can't blindly throw poorly-integrated features at the wall. This is one reason why good founders and product designers are incredibly valuable. They can be out there, listening to the customers, and trying to assemble everything they learn into a pattern. There may be data involved, but there's usually a lot of intuition, too. And engineering and support will also have valuable input.