Most KPIs come in pairs

Key to balancing short-term and long-term objectives.

In my first category management role after being a consultant, I was given a simple mandate:

Growth at all costs.

The remit was to capture meaningful market share.

Excited about the role, I invested aggressively to develop the category and establish scale. We exceeded targets for three straight quarters. I thought—and was told—that I was doing a fairly good job.

Then, leadership changed.

With the new guard, my category was suddenly judged on unit economics.
It looked crimson red.

What had been achievement in the old paradigm was now framed as reckless and indiscriminate expansion.

Within months, the situation became untenable, and I decided to leave.

That situation, I learned in due course, wasn’t uncommon at all.

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Why KPIs Need Counterweights

Unpaired KPIs don’t just create bad outcomes. They create retroactive judgment.

Every metric needs a counterweight.

Speed and Quality. Volume and Retention. Growth and Economics

We’ve known this since Balanced Scorecard was conceptualized. But knowing and doing are different things.

When you measure one without its counterweight, you get exactly what you incentivize :Local optimization. Global destruction.

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Revenue target or NPS score?

Years later, while scaling an online subscription business, I encountered a more conscious conundrum.

We were growing rapidly, but our NPS score was plummeting with growth.

During funnel experiments, my team found a user journey where revealing more information earlier led to lower subscription conversions—but materially reduced customer disappointment later and would likely improve NPS.

In the past, I’d often admonish field sales teams for mis-selling.
Here we were, encountering the same trade-off —just online.

NPS was 15% of my goal sheet. Revenue was 50%+.

I assigned the intervention medium priority, parking it for the next quarter, since we had burning revenue targets.

I wasn’t being malicious. Just ‘rational’.

If I had to make the call again, I’d choose NPS and protect the long term.

We did eventually implement it in the following quarter.

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The Alchemy of Revenue

More than a decade ago, we were baffled by a competitor who claimed to sell $1,000 subscriptions to a customer base far larger than what we believed could afford them.

They were recently funded and showed every signal of driving exponential revenue growth—much to the glee of their investors.

Our sales team’s espionage eventually uncovered the secret.

The $1,000 subscription included a free smartphone worth $750!

They weren’t selling software; they were selling $1,000 bills for $250 and calling it ‘exponential growth’.

To establish their premium credentials, they had creatively converted cost into revenue. Growth at all costs—literally.

A forensic audit eventually caught the ploy.

But for two quarters, their board deck looked phenomenal.

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Paying for the Right Outcome

A sales organization I worked with paired revenue targets with 12-month retention rates. I helped design the organization and the incentive model that did away with the classic hunting/farming split.
Every sales representative had 40% of commission at risk based on retained revenue.

If a customer churned within 12 months, that portion of commission simply didn’t vest.

Close rates dropped. Sales cycles lengthened. Reps became pickier about which deals to chase.

But churn stayed under 15%. Customer LTV trended toward ~2× the industry average.

We felt good about the alignment between incentives and outcomes, driving sustainable growth.

Not every organization is willing to accept the short-term trade-offs this requires.

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When do you need a pair?

• If someone can hit a KPI by sacrificing something important that isn’t measured
• If optimizing for the metric destroys the outcome you actually want
• If you’re tempted to game it—and gaming it would work

It’s a nod to Newton’s third law: Every KPI has a shadow KPI.

Most KPIs don’t fail because they are wrong. They fail because they are lonely.

Following are a few examples I’ve encountered over the years, organized by the trade-off they reveal.

In every one of these pairs, the first metric is easy to measure, but the second one is what actually builds the business. If you only look at the first, you aren’t managing—you’re just counting.

Growth vs. Sustainability

• Sales revenue → Customer retention/NPS
  Buying growth vs. earning it.
• Hiring speed → 90-day retention
  Filling seats vs. building a team.
• Logo growth → Customer concentration
  Market expansion vs. “whale” dependency.
• Procurement savings → Supplier concentration
  Saving cents vs. increasing systemic risk.

Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

• Response time → Resolution quality
  Being fast vs. being helpful.
• Meeting reduction → Decision backlog
  Clear calendars vs. frozen projects.
• Bug closure → Bug reopen rate
  Clearing the deck vs. fixing the root cause.
• Automation rate → Manual override frequency
  Removing humans vs. breaking edge cases.

Volume vs. Value

• Feature count → Time to first value
  Building more features vs. delivering value faster.
• Content output → Content shelf life
  Feeding the algorithm vs. building a long-term asset.
• Traffic → Conversion
  Getting eyes vs. getting customers.

Activity vs. Outcome

• Feature velocity → Quality/ratings
  Shipping code vs. shipping delight.
• SLA compliance → Customer effort score
  Meeting the contract vs. making it easy for the user.