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And why one team bought their own product at a competitor to hit a metric.
Kacey Sharrett, Vice President of Direct to Consumer at GoPro, joined us on a recent episode of The Frictionless Experience and told one of those stories that makes you stop, stare, and say, “Wait... what?”
She was working with a retailer focused on improving how effectively they can fulfill orders, and used fulfill rate as a key performance indicator.
If they could fill over 90% or 95% of the orders, then that would be success. They even received scorecards for omnichannel capabilities to evaluate stores on fill rate.
Kacey recalled:
On paper, the KPI was a success. The fill rate was met.
But in practice? The operation made zero business sense. It didn’t drive margin, improve efficiency, or benefit the customer. It just checked a box.
This is what happens when teams are pushed to optimize metrics without context. When the “what” becomes more important than the “why.” When the scoreboard starts driving the strategy.
Here are three steps to make sure your KPIs don’t do the same.
Step 1: Focus on the Business, Not Just the Metric
Retail lives and dies by data. Businesses track everything: conversion rates, units per transaction, margin dollars per square foot, sell-through velocity. These numbers are essential — but they’re not the end goal.
Too often, the metric becomes the mission.
We get so metric-focused that sometimes we optimize the metric and not the business.
The fill rate fiasco is a perfect example. The store associates weren’t trying to be inefficient — they were trying to succeed based on the rules they’d been given. They were solving for the KPI, not the customer. And certainly not the margin.
It’s easy to celebrate green arrows on a dashboard. But if those green arrows are hiding costly, convoluted workarounds, you haven’t actually moved the business forward — you’ve just made the data look prettier.
A healthy KPI should guide decision-making, not override common sense.
Ask yourself:
- Does this metric reflect actual business impact, or just activity?
- Are we rewarding behavior that drives long-term value, or just short-term optics?
- Would a customer benefit from the action taken to hit this number?
If the answer is no, it’s time to reevaluate what you’re optimizing for.
Step 2: Align Incentives Across Teams and Channels
One of the most common sources of KPI chaos? Siloed goals.
Kacey shared that in many retail organizations, each channel — DTC, wholesale, and in-store — is managed separately. They have different P&Ls, different ownership, and different KPIs.
She added:
The problem? The customer doesn’t see those silos. They expect a consistent experience.
But if you're measuring each channel individually and none of the incentives align across them, then everyone’s trying to win their number and the customer just gets lost in the middle,.
This leads to internal turf wars over sales attribution, conflicting decisions around pricing and promotions, and clunky handoffs that frustrate customers. Worse, it pits teams against one another instead of encouraging collaboration.
To fix this, your KPIs need to reflect the full picture. That means:
- Cross-functional goals that reward shared success
- Metrics that span channels, not just report on them individually
- Clear accountability for the end-to-end customer experience
If your store team is disincentivized to fulfill online orders, or your eComm team is penalized when customers convert in-store, you’re building a system that undermines itself.
On another episode of The Frictionless Experience, Angel Sing, VP of Customer Experience at Petco, noted that it's critical to establish shared customer-centric KPIs across all teams.
Companies could focus on “three or four business KPIs and customer KPIs” that everyone can work toward. When every department is aligned on what success looks like from the customer’s perspective, it encourages a unified effort rather than competition for individual metrics.
Read more about the most effective ways to unite departments rather than letting each team work toward its own isolated metrics.
Step 3: Pressure-Test Your KPIs Regularly
Even the best KPIs have a shelf life.
Your business evolves. Your customer evolves. The competitive landscape evolves. Yet, many organizations have stuck with the same legacy metrics for years without revisiting whether those metrics still serve the mission.
You have to constantly ask: Are these metrics still pointing us in the right direction? Are we measuring success in a way that aligns with our purpose?
This isn’t just about identifying vanity metrics — it’s about ensuring that your KPIs continue to reflect meaningful, strategic progress.
Too often, a KPI starts as a well-intentioned proxy for success. Over time, it becomes the success. And in the process, it loses its connection to what the business actually needs.
Think of it like steering by GPS but forgetting to check if the destination changed. You may be headed exactly where you planned, but is that still where you want to go?
Make KPI reviews a recurring part of your business rhythm. Get input from the teams closest to the data. And most importantly, ask how those numbers are showing up for the customer.
Final Thought: Metrics Are Tools, Not Targets
There’s nothing wrong with using KPIs to drive performance. In fact, we need them. They focus teams, clarify priorities, and make success measurable.
But they’re only effective when they’re grounded in strategy, connected to customer outcomes, and thoughtfully aligned across the organization.
When they’re not? You get stories like Kacey’s, where hitting the number requires driving to Walmart and buying your own product off the shelf.
That’s not a win. That’s a warning sign.
So here’s the challenge: Before you celebrate a KPI hitting green, ask yourself what it really took to get there. And whether the path to that number created value, or just the illusion of it.
During the holiday rush, every shopper matters
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