The metric became the target: how personal KPIs destroy exactly what they are meant to improve?

Formula 1 team at the Pit Stop

"What's the primary role of a goalkeeper in a football team?"

When I ask this question, I almost always get the same answer: "To guard the goal."

"And what's the primary role of a striker?" - "To score goals, obviously."

"And what about the team's physiotherapist?" - This is where I see people starting to get confused and realizing something isn't quite right with their answers.

Then I offer a counter-argument, which is actually quite trivial but factual, very few people answer me like this: The primary role of everyone on the team - from the goalkeeper to the physiotherapist - is for the team to win and achieve its goal.

This is the mindset that makes Lionel Messi, whose "responsibility" is to score goals, drop deep into defense when the team is under pressure. This is what makes a goalkeeper leave his post and go all the way to the opponent's goal when they need an equalizer in the last minute.

But imagine what would happen if every player was measured only by their individual KPI: The goalkeeper would say "Why should I go up for the corner? It'll hurt my goals-conceded statistics," the striker would say "Why should I drop back to defend? That's not my job and I'll get tired and won't be able to meet my targets."

Let's look at an even more extreme example: Formula 1 teams.

Picture this - an organization of 2,000 employees, in the larger teams, all working to ultimately support two drivers. There's a mechanic there, for instance, whose sole job is to change the rear right wheel during a pitstop. That's it. That's what he does. And if he doesn't meet his individual targets - if it takes him 2.8 seconds instead of 2.3 seconds to change that wheel - the entire team suffers. The team can lose positions and consequently, points.

So yes, individual measurement there is critical. Each person's individual performance directly affects the outcome. But - and here's the important point - the overall goal is crystal clear: to win the constructors' championship.

That same mechanic would never think "Why should I help the guy changing the front wheel? That's not my job." He knows that if his team doesn't work in perfect harmony, the team will fail. His individual metrics matter precisely because they serve the greater goal.

Sound familiar? Because this is exactly what doesn't happen in most organizations.

In product teams, I see this all the time: the product manager focuses only on the metrics of his features, development pushes to meet deadlines even if the product isn't ready, marketing wants more leads regardless of quality, and sales push deals even if the customer isn't a good fit for the product or sell something that doesn't even exist, just to meet their quota.

This week I met with a product manager whose responsibility is Product Led Growth (PLG), and his challenge was to push product initiatives across regions and departments. One of his initiatives was in the area of converting customers to paying customers - but the problem was that Onboarding belonged, in terms of responsibility, to another product manager. Both product managers felt conflicted and each went into defensive mode: the PLG manager was measured on overall growth (activation of new customers, conversion to paying customers, etc.), but the other product manager had different metrics - he had a Roadmap he committed to and was measured on.

So when their manager measures them each separately and doesn't give them all one North Star Metric, team play suffers and everyone worries about themselves first. It's exactly like a football player who doesn't want to help his teammate because it won't help his KPI.

In startups, this is even more critical - when the Developer refuses to help with Customer Support because "it's not his job," or when the Head of Marketing doesn't want to help with sales because "he has other KPIs," the startup fails.

Want a bigger absurdity? Most of the targets we set are completely arbitrary. That million-dollar target that management set for revenue at the end of the year - where does it come from? From deep business planning? From investor pressure? From the simple desire to "grow 2x"?

And here's the big question: What would happen if we met that target, but not in 12 months but in 14? Is that really a failure?

Want to see what this absurdity looks like at a global company level? Intel, 2024: The company reported a loss of $1.6 billion in the second quarter, reaching an annual loss of about $19 billion. The reason? A combination of poor strategic decisions, technological delays (in 10nm and Meteor Lake processes), and the fact that over the past decade they increased headcount by 10% while revenue dropped by $24 billion.

As a result - layoffs of 15,000 employees, almost 15% of the total workforce, to save $10 billion by 2025.

The question that troubles me: Were those 15,000 people bad employees? The answer: No. They met their individual targets, did their jobs professionally, and went home through no fault of their own.

The real problem: Management made poor strategic decisions - aggressively grew headcount without revenue justifying it, missed critical technological trends, and who paid the price? The employees.

This is exactly the problem: when the focus is only on short-term financial survival instead of long-term strategic thinking, the first solution is to throw people off the bus instead of fixing the real structural problems.

This is exactly the problem with the destructive metaphor that many managers use: "Our company is like a family." The intention behind this statement is good - to show that there's loyalty, warmth, and caring here, like in a family. But then cognitive dissonance occurs when you're "fired" from the family through no fault of your own, simply because the "head of the family" made a wrong decision. It's like giving a child up for adoption just because the parent made a bad financial decision.

More than that - in a family, responsibility falls only on the parents. If something doesn't work, as a child I don't bear responsibility (maybe subconsciously, but that's a topic for another post). And if that's the message in a business company, it creates employee disconnection from the greater responsibility, because the managers are the "parents" and they're responsible.

Instead, I prefer the analogy of a football team (or Formula 1 team). A team also has loyalty and caring, but there's also accountability. In a team, there's one big goal - to make the team win - and it falls on everyone in the team, including the staff beyond the lines. If something doesn't work, everyone shares responsibility for finding a solution. Just like in Formula 1.

So what's better: a team that before quarterly reports makes crazy discounts, sells "features" that don't exist just to meet their quota, and then immediately after puts the entire company in trouble meeting delivery of those deals? Or a team that only meets 80% of the target but shows consistent and systematic growth - yes, it will miss the deadline, but it's predictable, stable, and doesn't throw the entire system into chaos? I choose the second team every day.

Another example from the field: A car dealership I know. To meet sales targets, salespeople work on individual bonuses. The dealership also sells used cars, and the salespeople know which car will be more in demand and which less, which will be easy to "move" and which less. So what do they do? They open a fictitious order, even without earnest money or down payment, and thus that car is "locked" to that salesperson and no other salesperson can offer it.

The discourse in the company is toxic - you just need to enter the dealership and see the body language and atmosphere to see that they simply don't cooperate and just try to pounce on every customer who steps in there to be the first to grab them.

And another example: How many times has it happened to you that you called a call center for customer service or technical support and the call simply "disconnected"? As someone who worked in the call center field, it's very clear to me why. Because those representatives are measured on what's "easy to measure" - like call length (preferably short) and number of calls (as many as possible) as a proxy for the representative being good, because his output is high and he manages to close calls quickly.

The result? His KPIs are high, but service quality is low and damage to the company is high!

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in data and measurements. Moreover, I argue that everything can be measured and should be measured. KPIs aren't a bad thing. Measuring is excellent - but only as an indication to see if we're progressing in the direction and speed we want. The problem starts when the metric becomes the goal.

This is exactly why the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) methodology is so powerful. Instead of saying "meet this exact number, no matter how," OKRs say "this is our goal (Objective), and these are the signs we'll know we're progressing toward it (Key Results)."

In Formula 1, this works perfectly: The Objective is "to win the constructors' championship," and the Key Results are pitstop times, car performance, and of course - points in each race. Every mechanic knows that if he doesn't reach the 2.5-second time for changing the wheel, it will hurt the overall goal. But he also knows that if he sees his colleague struggling, he'll help - because the big goal is more important than his individual metric.

A client of mine, a startup in EdTech, moved from rigid KPIs to OKRs and changed the entire game. Before, sales pushed unsuitable customers to reach 50 new customers per month, product released half-finished features to meet 3 new features, and support closed tickets without really solving problems to meet 95% resolution within 24 hours.

After moving to OKRs, their Objective became "to create a user experience that makes customers enthusiastically recommend our product," with Key Results like NPS of 60+, reducing time-to-value for new customers to 7 days, and 40% of customers activating the new feature within a month.

The result? Despite not meeting 100% of the targets, they created a significantly better product, happier customers, and revenue grew by 40% as a natural result.

When moving from KPIs to OKRs, the conversation changes. Instead of "Why should I help my colleague? It won't help my KPI," you hear "How can I contribute to the shared goal? What's the smartest way to get there?"

Measurement isn't the enemy. The enemy is slavery to measurement.

The most winning teams in the world - whether it's Mercedes in Formula 1, Pep Guardiola's Barcelona, or Larry Page's Google - understand one simple principle: The goal is to win the game, not achieve pretty statistics.

When everyone plays for the same goal and measures themselves as leading indicators toward that goal, suddenly the striker is willing to give up a personal goal for the winning pass, the goalkeeper doesn't hesitate to leave his goal at the right time, and the Formula 1 mechanic will help his colleague even if it means he won't get the individual credit.

And when things don't go as planned? Instead of throwing people off the bus, you stop, analyze what didn't work, and adjust the strategy.

This doesn't just create better teams. It creates happier people who progress faster toward meaningful goals.

How does the measurement system look in your organization? Are you measuring to improve or to control? Share in the comments - I always love hearing examples from the field.

Martin H. Sabag | Creator of YourMarket.Fit | Product Leader