@sj_zero The business world has been plagued by this for at least 20 years (thank you MBA-mills). I remember when a company I worked for switched from a P&L to KPI metrics for their divisions. Suddenly the teams who were the most well-rounded struggled to hit goals and the score card players got the chance to look better than they deserved. That last for about two years until they pushed out a lot of talent who suddenly wasn't getting bonuses despite skill and tenure, and they rolled to using a hybrid system. My anecdotal observation was that women performed better in KPI land, but the net performance was lower across the company and the morale had tanked. You have to have accurate data to properly use KPIs, so now we can add a whole new cost in the form extremely expensive "data scientists" 😔 to help the business operate almost as well as it did when they simply focused on profitability and let managers finetune as needed.

Having been on both sides of this and done PM work, I find scorecards to be useful for pacing and planning, but it's the difference between strategy and tactics. You need a plan and goals, you need to be able to measure its success or failure, and you need to be willing to pivot to account for unknowns and not base your data on easily cheated metrics. Same goes for "politics".