The Mirage of Engagement

The neon-green party popper emoji is vibrating on my screen for the 41st time this morning. Our marketing lead, a man whose enthusiasm for bar charts borders on the religious, just announced that the landing page hit 1,000,001 unique visitors. The Slack channel is a digital landslide of ‘LFG’ and ‘huge if true’ and ‘rocket ship.’ Meanwhile, in my other tab-the one I keep open like a secret wound-the customer support dashboard is bleeding red. There are 101 open tickets from people whose accounts have been locked for 11 days. We are celebrating the fact that people are looking at us while ignoring the fact that we are failing the people who actually trusted us.

It is the corporate equivalent of cheering for a high-speed car crash because the friction generated some really interesting heat signatures.

The Price of Polish

I’m scrubbing through 21 minutes of raw audio from a podcast interview with a ‘disruptive’ CEO. My job is to turn his stutters into insights, to polish the pebbles of his speech until they look like diamonds. He’s talking about ‘top-of-funnel velocity’ and ‘brand resonance.’ Not once has he mentioned the product actually working. I feel that familiar, itchy sensation of being an accomplice to a fraud.

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It’s the same feeling I had yesterday when I waved back at a stranger on the street, only to realize they were waving at someone behind me. I spent the next 11 blocks staring at my shoes, wondering if I should just move to a different city and change my name.

That’s what our company is doing. We’re waving at a ghost of success while the actual person we’re supposed to be greeting is standing right behind us, confused and ignored. We have become a culture of empty calories. We crave the sugar rush of a ‘win’ that doesn’t require us to do the hard work of building something durable.

Optimization vs. Refactoring (Effort vs. Reward)

It’s easier to choose the visible, short-term metric boost over necessary foundational repair.

You can’t put ‘we didn’t break anything this week’ on a slide and expect a standing ovation, even though that’s exactly what the customers want. They want the fridge to stay cold. They want the stove to turn on.

The Cake Metaphor: Icing vs. Substance

The speakers use words like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘synergistic’ at least 11 times per hour. It reminds me of the time I tried to bake a cake for my sister’s 31st birthday. I spent three hours decorating the outside with intricate lace patterns made of royal icing. But I had forgotten to put the baking powder in the batter. The inside was a dense, rubbery disc of sadness that tasted like sweetened clay.

We are currently building a company that is all royal icing and no cake.

The Metrics That Lie

There is a profound dishonesty in modern business metrics. We track ‘time on site,’ but we don’t distinguish between a user who is captivated by our content and a user who is desperately trying to find the ‘cancel subscription’ button that we’ve hidden under 41 layers of CSS. We track ‘active users,’ but we don’t care if those users are active because they’re getting value or because they’re stuck in a loop of trying to fix a bug we haven’t acknowledged for 191 days.

The Unseen Struggle

Loyalty isn’t bought with 11% discount codes sent via automated email; it’s earned by being there when things go wrong.

The Utility of Simplicity

I recently had to replace my toaster. I didn’t want a ‘smart’ toaster that would tweet every time my sourdough was ready. I just wanted a piece of metal that got hot and stayed hot until the bread was brown. I found exactly what I needed at

Bomba.md, and the experience was a jarring reminder of what commerce is supposed to feel like.

Scale is the great lie of our era. We are told that if a process can’t be automated for 1,001,001 people, it isn’t worth doing. But empathy doesn’t scale. Integrity doesn’t scale. You cannot automate the feeling of being heard.

The Map vs. The Territory

When we celebrate a million clicks while 11 customers are screaming into the void of our support queue, we are declaring that we value the abstract over the concrete. I’ve seen 41 startups die this way.

Sometimes, I imagine replacing the ‘Milestones’ Slack channel with a channel dedicated to ‘Apologies.’ It would feel uncomfortable. It would feel slow. But it would also be honest. And in a world of 1,000,001 distractions, honesty is the only thing that actually cuts through the noise.

The Final Transcript Edit

I’m looking at a transcript where the CEO says, ‘Our goal is to create a frictionless experience for the modern consumer.’ I look at my notes: a bug in the mobile app has been documented in 111 separate support tickets preventing password changes. Frictionless.

I delete the word ‘frictionless’ from the transcript. Let’s see if his PR team notices. They probably won’t. They’re too busy planning the party for our next 11% increase in site traffic.

We celebrate activity because activity is easy to measure. Impact is hard. It requires you to look at the 1 person who is unhappy and ask why, instead of looking at the 1,001 people who haven’t complained yet and assuming everything is fine.

My recent waving mistake was a 1-second embarrassment, but the corporate mistake of waving at the wrong metrics is an 11-year tragedy. I’m finished with this transcript now. I’m going to go buy a toaster that actually works, from a place that actually cares, and I’m going to ignore the confetti for at least 31 minutes. Maybe longer. Maybe forever.