KPI Inflation Is a Real Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Adding a metric to a dashboard takes one Slack message and no approval process. Removing one requires someone to stand up and say "this doesn't matter," which is a much riskier sentence to say out loud in a meeting than "let's also track this." That asymmetry is the entire mechanism behind what I'd call KPI inflation, and almost nobody budgets time to fight it because it doesn't look like a problem until the dashboard has sixty tiles.

I've watched this happen at three different clients in the exact same shape: a new stakeholder joins, asks for one new metric relevant to their function, it gets added, and it's never removed even after that stakeholder moves on, because removing it now requires someone else to make the case against a metric they didn't ask for in the first place.

Nobody gets blamed for adding a metric. Someone always gets blamed for removing one. Guess which direction the dashboard grows.

Why this actually costs something

• Every added metric is a tiny ongoing engineering cost — a pipeline to maintain, a query to keep correct across schema changes.
• Every added metric dilutes the signal of the metrics that actually matter, because attention is finite and a sixty-tile dashboard gets skimmed, not read.
• Metric sprawl creates cover for cherry-picking — with enough metrics on a dashboard, someone can always find one that supports whatever story they wanted to tell.

The fix is boring and it's a calendar entry

The only thing that's worked for me is scheduling the removal conversation on purpose, quarterly, as its own agenda item separate from the "what should we add" conversation — because those two conversations have completely different social dynamics and mixing them means the add conversation always wins. Ask of every existing metric: what decision has this driven in the last quarter? If nobody can answer, it goes on the chopping block, and the chopping block gets a real decision, not a shrug.