Measured the wrong thing

Description

Numbers that are connected all the way through user value to your continued existence

Your solution ends up looking like it’s working when it’s really not
After a great amount of effort and money to acquire them, you start bleeding customers.
You probably throw a bunch of money at re-acquiring these “warm inactive leads” (generally they cost 3x to reacquire) instead of fixing the problem in the first place
Each attempt to move the wrong number gets more and more wrong. Eventually, the music stops and you never realised it was a funeral dirge - you were too busy trying to polka

Some smartass got the “you can’t improve what you don’t measure” part right, and entirely missed the part where measuring the wrong thing leads to improving the wrong thing
A new leadership hire will assert dominance by demanding quantified r-e-s-u-l-t-s and find themselves getting d-e-f-l-e-c-t-e-d by big numbers that look good
Some teams just want to feel good about a number they can make go up quickly instead of a number that matters, and in a culture that’s not critical about numbers everyone else buys the hype
And sometimes, nobody realises that metrics themselves abstract away important information - "the numbers made me do it" (see Sutherland’s talk on this)
Otherwise it can just be that you failed to create joined-up thinking across the organisation

Ask people what the point of the product is and see if anyone says “solve it so good that each successive customer gets cheaper to acquire”
Try a strategy different from “throw more VC money at it”
Try to understand why you're measuring something