[salsakran]

The best pilots most certainly use instruments when in clouds, storms or nighttime.

The trick with startups is that half the time you don't know you're in the clouds until too late. Especially in companies with immature reckoning of what customers are costing you, how growth is actually going and what users are doing, it's easy to hit a mountainside before you even realize you're off course.

It's worth pointing out that most KPI dashboards tend to be simply bad, and people tend mismatch their metrics to their cadence (eg looking at total numbers in a nightly email or quarterly numbers in a weekly kpi dashboard). Stop me before I rant for 20 pages on whether KPIs in the wild actually have anything to do with predictive performance of a function vs a backward looking number of convenience.