Measure What Matters? Sure. But Don’t Forget What You Can’t Measure.

“Measure what matters.” 

It’s one of those phrases that’s become so widely accepted in business that it no longer gets questioned. A tidy directive. Efficient. Sensible. Unassailable.

Until you try to live by it.

Because once you're deep inside a messy product cycle or wrestling with real customer behavior, the truth hits you: not everything that matters can be measured—at least not easily, and not in time to hit your next roadmap milestone or quarterly target.

Yes, measurement matters. We’re not here to argue against metrics. Metrics keep us honest. They help us track progress, identify patterns, and allocate resources with intent. But the moment we act like what’s measurable is all that matters, we start building blind.

The most powerful insights—the ones that shape great products, sticky brands, and lasting customer relationships—often start out fuzzy. Incomplete. Soft-edged. They live in emotion, motivation, aspiration, frustration. Things that don’t always show up in dashboards. Not right away.

And yet, those are the very drivers of behavior. Especially when we’re designing for humans. Whether your customer is a CIO at an enterprise tech company or a single parent picking out lunchbox snacks, they bring their full, gloriously irrational selves to the decision. Assumptions. Workarounds. Wishful thinking. Skepticism. Hope.

You can’t A/B test your way into understanding that. You have to listen. You have to notice. You have to dig in and synthesize.

This is especially true when you're trying to innovate—when you're not just optimizing what is, but creating something new. The early signs of a breakthrough don’t always show up in the numbers. They show up in offhand comments, in the eyes of someone lighting up as they describe a workaround, in the tension between what someone says they want and what they actually do.

We work in the age of data. But we live in the age of complexity.

So yes—measure what matters. But also respect what resists being measured. Make room for it. Because in that mess, in that ambiguity, in those moments where metrics fall short—that’s often where the real signal lives.

The best teams know how to work with data—and they also know when to lean into what the numbers haven’t captured yet.