| I have a (not really serious, but kind of) theory that metrics driven organizations stumble into various dark patterns through software bugs. In this case, that would look like: 1. You want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so. 2. Because of a bug in the code somewhere, you end up showing the discounted price in the cart until checkout. 3. Because some number of people don't pay attention and don't realize the switcheroo happens at the end this bug actually increases conversion. 4. Someone eventually notices the bug (after customers like you complain about it!). 5. When they fix it the metrics are adversely impacted. 6. The bug is now a "feature". This is of course all very shortsighted since you are essentially burning customer trust for a short-term gain in conversion so it's bad for the medium/long term business. But the team has to hit its KPIs, which are tracked on a daily/weekly basis! |
1. You (as a product owner/manager) want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.
2. You don't care about the the experience of the non-pro users, because that's not the metric you're optimizing, so you never specify to developers what should happen when lower-class users shop, except that at the end they have to pay the full price
3. Developers build something that works like the dark pattern described above (they are incentivized by keeping their sprint goals, not by making non-pro users happy).