> Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and organizationally, even though it produces awful software.
Engagement is such a terrible metric. I'm not saying it should be thrown out, but it is classic example of Goodhart's Law[0]. Rage is engagement. Too much reliance on engagement is what got social media into a race to the bottom. That's not the mark of a quality product.
Measuring is hard, you're right. But if you're going to use bad measurements (which often is our only choice) they shouldn't be targets. We should understand where they fail and use the information accounting for that, not ignoring it.
Not everything can be quantified but things should be at least qualitatively validated by the user base. Sometimes the problems are well know by anyone reading the app reviews and still aren't properly fixed.
Engagement is such a terrible metric. I'm not saying it should be thrown out, but it is classic example of Goodhart's Law[0]. Rage is engagement. Too much reliance on engagement is what got social media into a race to the bottom. That's not the mark of a quality product.
Measuring is hard, you're right. But if you're going to use bad measurements (which often is our only choice) they shouldn't be targets. We should understand where they fail and use the information accounting for that, not ignoring it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law