> but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent

Always look to the decision maker's incentives and you'll almost always discover why things are the way they are. And often, to your point, there's an aspect of tunnel vision associated with it because considering the bigger picture is difficult as a company grows and becomes more complex and creates friction in achieving goals.

Ultimately, this is the purpose of senior leadership. But the Peter Principal really begins to kick in at that level and the truth is, many senior leaders are in over their head and are unable to materialize the broader strategy and understand how their various units are affecting it. So we end up with crappy products.

It seems like every company goes through some version of this. At Twitter there was a channel called #ios-six-bars or something like that that started when an engineer posted a screenshot of the home timeline with six bars of things on it, all from jockeying teams trying to grab a spot on that page: Home, Spaces, all the new features just had to be thrown in the face of somebody who probably just wanted to read some tweets. Discussions were had, product cohesion was brought up, then things went quiet for a bit. Until someone posted a new screenshot a couple months later with seven bars on the screen.