Blog
The Cobra Effect: Why Your KPIs Are Creating the Wrong Behavior
When you pay people for dead snakes, they will start breeding them. A lesson in Goodhart’s Law and Perverse Incentives.
January 1, 2026
No Comments
When you pay people for dead snakes, they will start breeding them. A lesson in Goodhart’s Law and Perverse Incentives.
Why listening to your happiest customers might be the worst product strategy you can have.
Why “zero friction” is bad for retention, and how to design “positive friction” into your user onboarding.
Why Costco (and Slack) intentionally bleed money on one product to dominate the market with another.
Why the “Medium” option exists only to make the “Large” look cheap, and how to apply this to your Pricing Page.
In the AI era, the easiest path to launch is often the fastest path to irrelevance. How to decide between an API wrapper and a
Why adding more features often makes your product worse, and the difficult art of “Subtraction Strategy.”
An analysis of the Scarcity and Social Proof tactics used by major booking platforms, and the fine line between persuasion and manipulation.
Why revenue isn’t always good revenue, and how to stop your SaaS company from turning into an IT Services shop.
Why the smartest AI products get better with every click, and how to design that loop.