“KPIs — don't overthink it. A KPI's usefulness goes down proportional to the amount of time you spent thinking about it. The best ones are just like: how many people use the feature, how many dollars through the feature. If a KPI you need a PhD to design, you probably need at least a masters to understand it.”

Simple KPIs Beat Complex Ones — If It Takes a PhD to Design, No One Will Use It

Complex KPIs look rigorous but fail in practice because no one except their creator understands them well enough to act on them. Taylor Wells observed teams designing elaborate composite metrics that were technically precise but practically ignored. The inverse: the KPIs that actually changed behavior at Disney+ were the ones a PM could explain in one sentence. Clarity of metric beats theoretical accuracy every time.