- Ambitious Mission Statements, Misaligned Execution
- How I Created the Impact Mindset
- Overuse of Usage Metrics as Success Criteria
- How Grand Ambitions Became Usage Obsessions
- The Pitfalls of Solely Prioritizing Usage
- Measurements of Success Beyond Usage and Usability
- Comprehensive Approach to Metrics for Your Team
- Chapter Recap
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Overuse of Usage Metrics as Success Criteria
A pattern is seen time and time again by companies developing digital products of all kinds: their initial, noble aspirations undergo a metamorphosis, gravitating toward a singular focus on maximizing user engagement for immediate revenue benefits. Prioritizing the growth of effortlessly developed surface metrics, they sideline creating transformative experiences that could benefit both the individual user and the broader global community and instead focus on marginal additions. It has led to about half of product teams suggesting daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU) being the primary measurements for success. Employees recognize this turn but don’t fight it as their incentives become aligned to these metrics, and leadership enjoys the ability to point toward growth—regardless of what it means. Usage, a simple metric of whether someone engaged with a product, becomes the primary means of determining success.
Consider the evolution of Facebook. Starting as a digital yearbook, it stayed true to its mission of building community within college campuses. However, as its reach expanded beyond the confines of educational institutions, so did its user base—bridging geographical divides and fostering connections across regions and nations. The introduction of advertising mechanisms marked a pivotal shift; a new imperative to retain users for prolonged durations, primarily to enhance ad visibility, became supreme. This shift replaced a focus of fulfilling user community needs to encourage loyalty with a content strategy often prioritizing emotionally charged narratives, sparking debates and ensuring repeated user engagement. Before long, the Facebook product team abandoned its pursuit of increased social well-being and instead adopted a new strategy of building a platform that would do everything possible to keep users glued to their screens while filling space with ads whenever possible to juice profit.
As 2024 rolled around, Facebook began to communicate a desire to return to its roots and in doing so move closer to pursuing their mission of building a healthy community that creates more positive relationships than divisions. It begs the question, where should they begin? A possible starting point could be a recalibration of their content algorithm, emphasizing narratives that foster positivity. From there, they could develop new features to facilitate authentic community interactions and create deeper connections that might require conversations outside the Facebook ecosystem. It would require developing tools that nudge users toward more prosocial behavior along with determining what users genuinely desire out of a social platform and ensuring their new releases contribute to improving those factors.
This narrative isn’t exclusive to Facebook. Most successful social media enterprises set out to establish new ways to allow people to communicate with each other. Yet, influenced by the pursuit of never-ending profit growth, they have shifted their focus to building emotional and gamified experiences to keep users glued to their products. Addiction equates to continuous advertising revenue. Of course, this shift probably didn’t happen all at once, after one boardroom decision. Instead, it was likely a slippery slope as these companies incentivized their product teams to focus on the creation of free products that, through people’s usage, generate valuable data used for targeting ads. Our modern social media industry continues to grow while it is also known to be increasing the likelihood of adverse mental outcomes for its users.
What they left on the table is the ability to fulfill user needs by creating products that sell themselves and encourage sustained loyalty. The advertising model, though financially successful, has left these companies vulnerable to fluctuations in consumer spending. Pressed to sell their products, early examples of paid versions of these platforms have shown little promise. Users appear reluctant to pay for services that fail to meet their fundamental needs for social connection. Another ramification of this is shown by how TikTok was able to quickly capture a part of this attention economy and build a strong user base. Had Facebook adequately fulfilled the needs for connection and entertainment, TikTok’s ascent might have been less meteoric.
Social media companies are the most straightforward case study for what it means to maximize usage above all else; they have been able to survive by building addictive yet not always effective products. Many companies don’t have the option of advertisement revenue. When they over-rely on usage, it means building a customer base that is expensive to acquire and is ready to flee as soon as a better alternative is created. It also leads product teams to feel bad about their work, with a 2021 survey by Productboard1 suggesting that 69 percent of teams say their products and features are not consistently well-received by customers.
The video game industry illustrates this, with its increasing focus on engagement to drive microtransactions. This strategy has sparked a backlash, driving players toward independent developers who prioritize the creation of genuinely enjoyable and engaging games. Such shifts in consumer allegiance are telltale signs of an industry’s overemphasis on engagement at the expense of meaningful impact. Overreliance on surface-level engagement metrics brought upon by misaligned business objectives has yielded many missed opportunities to genuinely impact desired user outcomes.