[sytelus]

The criteria "product's long term financial success" doesn't have a lot of meaning. Does it mean my bonus is withheld until 5 years? What if something else goes wrong in such long time frame (like economy tanks) which wasn't my fault? What if someone unrelated contributes to 5-year success and I get to share the glory?

The point is that measuring performance off of single metric is incredibly tricky. In the field of reinforcement learning this is known as reward function engineering and its one of the hardest thing to get right for even well specified problems. Employee actions would need to have short term as well as long term focus (exploitation vs exploration). Most actions have consequences that won't reveal itself completely until sometime in future. The current "state of the art" technique is to use stock vest schedule with hope that employee would care to grow his/her future stock vest.