I’ve spent a lot of my product design career pushing for metrics—proving ROI, showing impact, making the case for design in business terms. But I’ve also seen how metrics become the goal rather than a signal pointing toward the goal. When the number goes up, we celebrate. When it doesn’t, we tweak the collection process. Meanwhile, the user becomes secondary. Last week’s big idea was around metrics, this piece piles on.

Pavel Samsonov calls this out:

Managers can only justify their place in value chains by inventing metrics for those they manage to make it look like they are managing.

I’ve sat in meetings where we debated which numbers to report to leadership—not which work to prioritize for users. The metrics become theater. So-called “vanity metrics” that always go up and to the right.

But here’s where Pavel goes somewhere unexpected. He doesn’t let designers off the hook either:

Defining success by a metric of beauty offers a useful kind of vagueness, one that NDS seems to hide behind despite the slow loading times or unnavigability that seem to define their output; you can argue with slow loading times or difficulty finding a form, but you cannot meaningfully argue with “beautiful.”

“Taste” and “beauty” are just another avoidance strategy. That’s a direct challenge to the design discourse that’s been dominant lately—the return to craft, the elevation of aesthetic judgment. Pavel’s saying it’s the same disease, different symptom. Both metrics obsession and taste obsession are ways to avoid the ambiguity of actually defining user success.

So what’s the alternative? Pavel again:

Fundamentally, the work of design is intentionally improving conditions under uncertainty. The process necessarily involves a lot of arguments over the definition and parameters of “improvement”, but the primary barrier to better is definitely not how long it takes to make artifacts.

The work is the argument. The work is facing the ambiguity rather than hiding behind numbers or aesthetics. Neither Figma velocity nor visual polish is a substitute for the uncomfortable conversation about what “better” actually means for the people using your product.