The Cobra Effect: Why Your KPIs Are Creating the Wrong Behavior
The Law of Unintended Consequences The Cobra story is a classic example of what economists call a Perverse Incentive—an incentive that produces a result contrary to the intentions of its designers. In the world of Product Management, we live and die by metrics. We set OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). We give bonuses based on numbers. But if you pick the wrong number, you don’t just get no results; you get bad results. ...