Consumer Revenue Platforms

Consumer platforms have a specific kind of pressure that enterprise work doesn’t: every decision has a visible number attached to it. Conversion rate. Revenue per session. Cart abandonment.

This is clarifying and constraining in equal measure.

The clarifying part: you always know if something worked. The constraining part: the pressure to optimize for the visible number can crowd out the judgment needed to make good long-term decisions.

What we didn’t expect

The metric that mattered most wasn’t the one we were tracking. We were optimizing for conversion rate at checkout — a reasonable proxy — while customer lifetime value was quietly declining. We caught it on month three. Earlier instrumentation would have caught it on week two.

[Full case study to be written.]