[d23]

It's a downward spiral. Short-term-focused metrics and promotion cycles have no way to see beyond local optimization. With each cycle of changes, the product is increasingly user hostile and the corporate culture gets further away from knowing how to build product features that are usable and enjoyable. It gets harder and harder to get the numbers to go up legitimately, so PMs and complicit engineers resort to even more user-hostile behavior.

It's a cancer that has infected the industry under the guise of being data driven. We've thrown out basic reasoning in favor of juicing vanity numbers. And then the people responsible for driving the product into a ditch fail upward to another company, get a bigger title and salary, and start grabbing at the wheel of a new car to repeat the cycle.