You are completely right on Goodhart's Law. I know this from experience.
I put the customer first in the belief that 'the rain follows the plough' and, if you put the customer first, then all else follows.
I see metrics as there to be cracked. If you are measuring the right things then you can see where the problems are, fix the problems and move on to measuring different metrics that are more specific and focused on the remaining problem areas. For me it is a campaign where initial reactive firefighting gives way to calm, proactive problem solving, fixing problems before they are of consequence. Along the way many unexpected things are learned about the customer.
I do all this with a focus on the customer, meanwhile my colleagues in marketing are out for themselves. They are the dead weight keeping progress back as they have to do things like buy traffic and hold on to keyword optimised URLs that are cargo cult SEO. Their reports for their micromanagers are always measuring the same stuff, e.g. 'engagement', yet they could be engaging customers solely for the purpose of pissing them off for them to never come back.
My favourite is the pop up shown as someone leaves a website begging them to stay, or the sign up to the newsletter popup. These could get one extra sale at the cost of pissing off a million people but if you only measure the former then it all seems good.
In the capitalist world only one metric matters to the shareholders. Once I worked for a highly successful company that sent out sales newsletters with no measurement whatsoever of open rates or click throughs. None of that was needed. The problem was emptying the warehouse too quickly to have no stock left. Customers would be waiting for our email, not ignoring them. We had plenty of engagement with the customers as they actually bought stuff.
Subsequently I have worked for agencies where they spend a fortune on some email service and they get these fancy graphs to show the clients of these open rates the world over. Which had wow value at the time and 'engagement' stats. But I had come from somewhere where we had no need to measure that stuff, we weren't looking at these charts, we were coping with a deluge of orders and had no time for that.
I put the customer first in the belief that 'the rain follows the plough' and, if you put the customer first, then all else follows.
I see metrics as there to be cracked. If you are measuring the right things then you can see where the problems are, fix the problems and move on to measuring different metrics that are more specific and focused on the remaining problem areas. For me it is a campaign where initial reactive firefighting gives way to calm, proactive problem solving, fixing problems before they are of consequence. Along the way many unexpected things are learned about the customer.
I do all this with a focus on the customer, meanwhile my colleagues in marketing are out for themselves. They are the dead weight keeping progress back as they have to do things like buy traffic and hold on to keyword optimised URLs that are cargo cult SEO. Their reports for their micromanagers are always measuring the same stuff, e.g. 'engagement', yet they could be engaging customers solely for the purpose of pissing them off for them to never come back.
My favourite is the pop up shown as someone leaves a website begging them to stay, or the sign up to the newsletter popup. These could get one extra sale at the cost of pissing off a million people but if you only measure the former then it all seems good.
In the capitalist world only one metric matters to the shareholders. Once I worked for a highly successful company that sent out sales newsletters with no measurement whatsoever of open rates or click throughs. None of that was needed. The problem was emptying the warehouse too quickly to have no stock left. Customers would be waiting for our email, not ignoring them. We had plenty of engagement with the customers as they actually bought stuff.
Subsequently I have worked for agencies where they spend a fortune on some email service and they get these fancy graphs to show the clients of these open rates the world over. Which had wow value at the time and 'engagement' stats. But I had come from somewhere where we had no need to measure that stuff, we weren't looking at these charts, we were coping with a deluge of orders and had no time for that.