A while back, I worked with a product team at a mid-sized tech firm that was hitting nearly every performance target:
- 90% of planned work completed per sprint
- Zero defects in the last release
- “On time, on budget” for six consecutive quarters
Impressive, right?
And yet… no one was celebrating.
The team was burned out and disengaged. The product hadn’t seen a meaningful improvement in over a year. Usage was stagnant. Internal stakeholders had stopped offering feedback because “nothing really changes anyway.”
When we finally dug in, the problem wasn’t the people. It was the scoreboard.
They had been measuring predictability, efficiency, and control—and so that’s exactly what they got.
But those metrics, as it turned out, were actively discouraging the team from trying anything bold or new.
Metrics Shape Behavior—Whether You Mean Them To or Not
Every metric is a signal to your team: this is what we care about.
So when you celebrate things like:
- “story points completed”
- “tasks closed”
- “velocity maintained”
…what you’re really doing is rewarding throughput, not insight.
Speed, not impact.
Predictability, not learning.
It’s not that those measures are bad. They’re just incomplete.
And when they dominate the dashboard, they quietly kill your organization’s capacity for innovation.
The “Efficiency Trap”
This isn’t a new insight. In fact, Peter Drucker warned us decades ago:
“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
More recently, Rita McGrath (Columbia Business School) has written about the dangers of clinging to outdated success metrics in fast-moving markets. Her research shows that companies that continue to rely on legacy KPIs tend to underperform when entering new markets or trying to innovate, because they’re still measuring the past—even while trying to create the future.
In other words: you can’t optimize your way to a breakthrough.
Case in Point: Nokia vs. Apple
Before the iPhone, Nokia was dominating the global mobile phone market.
Their KPIs focused heavily on hardware reliability, unit sales, and cost efficiency.
And by those metrics, they were winning.
Apple, meanwhile, optimized for experience, customer satisfaction, and ecosystem value—metrics that didn’t make sense to most telecom executives at the time.
We know how that story ended.
The issue wasn’t that Nokia didn’t care about innovation.
They just weren’t measuring the things that would have forced them to act differently.
What to Track Instead
If you want your team to be more innovative, you need metrics that reward exploration and adaptation. Consider:
- Experiment Velocity – How many experiments are being run per quarter? Are they tied to hypotheses, not just features?
- Time to Insight – How quickly are you gathering meaningful feedback on what you build?
- Learning Ratio – For every 10 decisions made, how many were revised based on new evidence?
- Confidence Scores – Does your team feel confident they’re solving the right problem, not just shipping features?
These metrics may be harder to quantify—but they spark the right conversations.
They help leaders focus not just on what got done, but what was learned.
A Real-World Turnaround
Several marketing agencies we’ve worked with have measured “project completion rate” as a north star. But the projects they completed weren’t moving the needle. Clients were lukewarm. Creativity had flatlined.
We helped them shift toward a new system of measurement that tracked idea generation, client feedback response time, and experiment-to-launch ratio. Within months, the team was not only more engaged—they were delivering higher-quality campaigns in less time, because they were spending less time stuck in rework.
The right metrics didn’t just change how they measured success.
They changed how they worked.
Try This With Your Team
At your next strategy review or team retro, bring this question:
“What are we measuring that might actually be slowing us down?”
And follow it with:
“What new metric—if we had the courage to track it—could lead to better decisions?”
Then give the team permission to experiment with how they measure.
Treat your KPIs like hypotheses, not commandments.
Metrics can either reinforce the status quo or help you escape it.
