A Failure Hackers Story – when an organisation drowns in metrics, dashboards, and KPIs – but misses the one signal that actually matters.
1. Everything Was Being Measured
At SynapseScale, nothing escaped measurement.
The London-based SaaS company sold workflow automation software to large enterprises. At 300 employees, it had recently crossed the invisible threshold where start-up intuition was replaced by scale-up instrumentation.
Dashboards were everywhere.
On screens by the lifts.
In weekly leadership packs.
In quarterly all-hands meetings.
In Slack bots that posted charts at 9:00 every morning.
Velocity.
Utilisation.
Customer NPS.
Feature adoption.
Pipeline health.
Bug counts.
Mean time to resolution.
The CEO, Marcus Hale, loved to say:
“If it moves, we measure it.
If we measure it, we can manage it.”
And for a while, it worked.
Until it didn’t.
2. The Problem No Metric Could Explain
Elena Marković, Head of Platform Reliability, was the first to notice something was wrong.
Customer churn was creeping up — not dramatically, but steadily. Enterprise clients weren’t angry. They weren’t even loud.
They were just… leaving.
Exit interviews were vague:
- “We struggled to get value.”
- “It felt harder over time.”
- “The product wasn’t unreliable — just frustrating.”
Support tickets were within tolerance.
Uptime was 99.97%.
SLAs were being met.
Yet something was eroding.
Elena brought it up in the exec meeting.
“None of our dashboards explain why customers are disengaging,” she said.
Marcus frowned. “The numbers look fine.”
“That’s the problem,” she replied. “They only show what we’ve decided to look for.”
The CFO jumped in. “Are you suggesting the data is wrong?”
“No,” Elena said carefully. “I’m suggesting we’re listening to noise and missing the signal.”
The room went quiet.
3. The First Clue — When Teams Stop Arguing
A week later, Elena sat in on a product planning meeting.
Something struck her immediately.
No one disagreed.
Ideas were presented. Heads nodded. Decisions were made quickly. Action items were assigned.
On paper, it looked like a high-performing team.
But she’d been in enough engineering rooms to know:
real thinking is messy.
After the meeting, she asked a senior engineer, Tom:
“Why didn’t anyone push back on the new rollout timeline?”
Tom hesitated. Then said quietly:
“Because arguing slows velocity. And velocity is the metric that matters.”
That sentence landed heavily.
Later that day, she overheard a designer say:
“I had concerns, but it wasn’t worth tanking the sprint metrics.”
Elena wrote a note in her notebook:
When metrics become goals, they stop being measures.
She remembered reading something similar on Failure Hackers.
4. The Trap of Proxy Metrics
That evening, she revisited an article she’d saved months ago:
When Metrics Become the Problem
(The article explored how proxy measures distort behaviour.)
One passage stood out:
“Metrics are proxies for value.
When the proxy replaces the value,
the system optimises itself into failure.”
Elena felt a chill.
At SynapseScale:
- Velocity had replaced thoughtful delivery
- Utilisation had replaced sustainable work
- NPS had replaced customer understanding
- Uptime had replaced experience quality
They weren’t managing the system.
They were gaming it — unintentionally.
And worse: the dashboards rewarded silence, speed, and superficial agreement.
5. The Incident That Broke the Illusion
The breaking point came quietly.
A major enterprise customer, NorthRail Logistics, requested a routine platform change — nothing critical. The change was delivered on time, within SLA, and without outages.
Three weeks later, NorthRail terminated their contract.
The exit call stunned everyone.
“You met all the metrics,” the customer said.
“But the change broke three downstream workflows.
We reported it. Support closed the tickets.
Technically correct. Practically disastrous.”
Elena replayed the phrase in her mind:
Technically correct. Practically disastrous.
That was the system in a sentence.
6. Symptom Sensing — Listening Differently
Elena proposed something radical:
“Let’s stop looking at dashboards for two weeks.”
The CEO laughed. “You’re joking.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Instead, let’s practice Symptom Sensing.”
She referenced a Failure Hackers concept:
Symptom Sensing — the practice of detecting weak signals before failure becomes visible in metrics.
Reluctantly, Marcus agreed to a pilot.
For two weeks, Elena and a small cross-functional group did something unusual:
- They read raw customer emails
- They listened to support calls
- They sat with engineers during incidents
- They observed meetings without agendas
- They noted hesitations, not decisions
- They tracked where people went quiet
Patterns emerged quickly.
7. The Signal Emerges
They noticed:
- Engineers raised concerns in private, not in meetings
- Designers felt overruled by delivery metrics
- Support teams closed tickets fast to hit targets
- Product managers avoided difficult trade-offs
- Leaders interpreted “no objections” as alignment
The most important signal wasn’t in the data.
It was in the absence of friction.
Elena summarised it bluntly:
“We’ve created a system where the safest behaviour
is to stay quiet and hit the numbers.”
Marcus stared at the whiteboard.
“So we’re… succeeding ourselves into failure?”
“Yes,” she said.
8. Mapping the System
To make it undeniable, Elena introduced Systems Thinking.
Using guidance from Failure Hackers, she mapped the feedback loops:
Reinforcing Loop — Metric Obedience
Leadership pressure → metric focus → behaviour adapts to metrics → metrics look good → pressure increases
Reinforcing Loop — Silenced Expertise
Metrics reward speed → dissent slows delivery → dissent disappears → errors surface later → trust erodes
Balancing Loop — Customer Exit
Poor experience → churn → leadership reaction → tighter metrics → worsened behaviour
The room was silent.
For the first time, the dashboards were irrelevant.
The system explained everything.
9. The Wrong Question Everyone Was Asking
The COO asked:
“How do we fix the metrics?”
Elena shook her head.
“That’s the wrong question.”
She pulled up another Failure Hackers article:
Mastering Problem Solving: How to Ask Better Questions
“The right question,” she said,
“is not ‘What should we measure?’
It’s ‘What behaviour are we currently rewarding — and why?’”
That reframed everything.
10. The Assumption Nobody Challenged
Using Surface and Test Assumptions, Elena challenged a core belief:
Assumption: “If metrics are green, the system is healthy.”
They tested it against reality.
Result: demonstrably false.
Green metrics were masking degraded experience, suppressed learning, and long-term fragility.
The assumption was retired.
That alone changed the conversation.
11. Designing for Signal, Not Noise
Elena proposed a redesign — not of dashboards, but of feedback structures.
Changes Introduced:
- Fewer Metrics, Explicitly Imperfect
Dashboards now displayed:- confidence ranges
- known blind spots
- “what this metric does NOT tell us”
- Mandatory Dissent Windows
Every planning meeting included:- “What might we be wrong about?”
- “Who disagrees — and why?”
- After Action Reviews for Successes
Not just failures.
“What went well — and what nearly didn’t?” - Customer Narratives Over Scores
One real customer story replaced one metric every week. - Decision Logs Over Velocity Charts
Why decisions were made mattered more than how fast.
12. The Discomfort Phase
The transition was painful.
Meetings took longer.
Metrics dipped.
Executives felt exposed.
Marcus admitted privately:
“It feels like losing control.”
Elena replied:
“No — it’s gaining reality.”
13. The Moment It Clicked
Three months later, another major customer raised an issue.
This time, the team paused a release.
Velocity dropped.
Dashboards turned amber.
But the issue was resolved before customer impact.
The customer renewed — enthusiastically.
The CFO said quietly:
“That would never have happened six months ago.”
14. What Changed — And What Didn’t
SynapseScale didn’t abandon metrics.
They demoted them.
Metrics became:
- indicators, not objectives
- prompts for questions, not answers
- signals to investigate, not declare success
The real shift was cultural:
- silence decreased
- disagreement increased
- decision quality improved
- customer trust returned
The noise didn’t disappear.
But the signal was finally audible.
Reflection: Listening Is a System Skill
This story shows how organisations don’t fail from lack of data —
they fail from misinterpreting what data is for.
Failure Hackers tools helped by:
- Symptom Sensing — detecting weak signals before metrics move
- Systems Thinking — revealing how incentives shaped behaviour
- Asking Better Questions — breaking metric fixation
Author’s Note
This story explores a subtle but increasingly common failure mode in modern organisations: measurement-induced blindness.
At SynapseScale, nothing was “broken” in the conventional sense. Systems were stable. Metrics were green. Processes were followed. Yet the organisation was slowly drifting away from the very outcomes those metrics were meant to protect.
The failure was not a lack of data — it was a misunderstanding of what data is for.
This story sits firmly within the Failure Hackers problem-solving lifecycle, particularly around:
- Symptom sensing — noticing weak signals before formal indicators change
- Surfacing assumptions — challenging the belief that “green metrics = healthy system”
- Systems thinking — revealing how incentives and feedback loops shape behaviour
- Better questioning — shifting focus from “what should we measure?” to “what behaviour are we rewarding?”
The key lesson is not to abandon metrics, but to demote them – from answers to prompts, from targets to clues, from truth to starting points for inquiry.
When organisations learn to listen beyond dashboards, they rediscover judgement, curiosity, and trust – the foundations of resilient performance.
🎨 Featured Image Description
Title: The Signal in the Noise
Description:
A modern SaaS office filled with large wall-mounted digital dashboards glowing green with charts, KPIs, and performance metrics. In the foreground, a woman stands slightly turned away from the screens, focused on a laptop video call with a customer. Beside her, a wall is covered with handwritten sticky notes capturing observations, questions, and concerns — messy, human, and qualitative.
The image visually contrasts clean, confident metrics with raw human insight, reinforcing the central theme of the story.
Mood:
Quiet tension and insight — thoughtful rather than dramatic. A sense that something important is being noticed beneath the surface.
Alt Text (Accessibility):
A SaaS team leader listens to a customer call while performance dashboards glow green behind her, highlighting the contrast between metrics and lived experience.
🧠 DALL·E Prompt
A realistic photograph of a modern SaaS office. Large wall-mounted digital dashboards glow green with charts and KPIs. In the foreground, a woman stands slightly turned away from the screens, listening intently on a laptop video call with a customer. A nearby wall is covered in handwritten sticky notes with observations and questions. The contrast highlights human insight versus digital metrics. Natural lighting, documentary style, neutral tones, subtle depth of field. –ar 16:9 –style raw
