I am so tired of watching people continue to juice numbers by doing things to boost short-term growth and causing attrition in places that are not tracked–spelling disaster in the long term. As an industry, we have really failed in creating "sustainable metrics".
The funny thing is that we all kind of already know exactly where these blinds spots are: if you are measuring engagement, it's easy to boost that by giving people things that keep them addicted to the platform. So you want to counterbalance by measuring conversation health.
If you're looking at new signups: you can easily boost this by putting a thing in everyone's face to ask for that. Obviously, you want to make sure that the people who are doing this actually stick around, rather than are just making a throwaway because you forced it on them.
"The metrics went up" is often used as a way to implement non-sustainable, user-hostile features. When that happens, it can be hard to go against a "data-driven" decision. Make sure to ask about which metrics they're *not* tracking–frequently they'll paint a different picture.
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