“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger
Product teams have largely taken over software development. And in a world where most products are venture backed, where everything is a land grab, there tends to be a winner-take-all mentality.
One outcome: many product teams are incentivized (at least in part) based on engagement data. And you tend to get what you incentivize.
That means more services becoming walled gardens. Layering on functionality to cover more use cases, while making it harder to get your data back out. Salesforce wants you to stay inside Salesforce. Slack inside Slack. And so on.
But this isn’t how people work. Your product will never be the one-stop-shop for everything a customer needs to do. You hire products to do a job. Linear for issue management. GitHub to version source code. Etc. To get sufficient context to do their jobs well, people and teams need data from your app and several others (not to mention “soft tissue” silos of information locked in people’s heads.)
Steady is designed to run in the background. We want it distilling plans & progress from all of the context that matters, automatically pushing summaries to give everyone sufficient clarity to make better decisions.
But this approach – doing a small number of things really well, running in the background as much as possible – means our “engagement” numbers will suffer, like “time on page” or click rates. With Steady, you read a digest or absorb a report, and then you’re done.
Which means “engagement” can’t be our North Star – at least not as it’s classically defined.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with incentivizing for engagement. Just be conscious of what the downstream implications might be for your product, and how that will ultimately affect the lives of your customers. What gets measured gets managed.
