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Alexa, Change Your OKRs

A failure of metrics and corporate incentives

So, I expect they’ve run tests that show that adding a given upsell doesn’t negatively impact user retention over some period, say 3 months. But it’s difficult to measure the impact of layering lots of these little annoyances on top of each other, and each subteam within the Alexa org is incentivized to promote their own little feature (after all, they have to hit their OKRs!). So the experience gets more and more bloated with upsells, until one day the user is so fed up he throws the Alexa out of his window, and it hits an innocent bystander, and they die a death that could have been avoided with a more thoughtful management structure.

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