A product team hits its numbers. The dashboard looks clean. And the business is slowly heading off a cliff. Rupon Anandanadarajah has seen it enough times to spot the pattern.
His take on SaaS metrics isn’t that they’re broken. It’s that companies are using them as answers when they should be using them as questions. That distinction — small as it sounds — is where a lot of growth quietly unravels.
The Proxy Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s the thing: most SaaS metrics don’t actually measure outcomes. They measure behaviour that’s supposed to indicate outcomes.
Activation rates. Retention signals. Conversion numbers. Each one is a proxy. And Anandanadarajah points out something teams rarely stop to question — are those proxies still accurate?
Strip onboarding down too aggressively and activation climbs. Long-term engagement falls apart. Users clicked through. They just didn’t get the product.
The metric improved. The business didn’t.
Why Smart Teams Keep Doing It
This isn’t stupidity. It’s structure.
Quarterly pressure is real. Investors want traction signals; executives want something to report; product teams get evaluated on measurable output. So naturally, decisions tilt toward whatever moves numbers fast — not necessarily what builds something durable.
Anandanadarajah describes this as a feedback loop that compounds slowly, then all at once. Optimisation without understanding, he argues, is just a very efficient way of running in the wrong direction.
The catch? It can look like progress for a long time before it doesn’t.
When Everyone’s Winning and the Business Isn’t
Fragmentation makes this worse. Marketing chases lead volume. Product targets activation. Customer success owns retention. Every team hits its SaaS metrics. The business as a whole — not so much.
Local optimisation at the expense of global outcomes. Nobody’s doing a bad job; nobody’s agreed on what success looks like at the system level. Improvements in one area quietly introduce friction somewhere else. That friction rarely shows up in anyone’s dashboard.
What the Numbers Can’t Tell You
Behavioural data shows what happened. It won’t tell you why.
That gap is where decisions go wrong. A drop in feature usage might mean the feature is bad — or users don’t know it exists — or a UI change buried it three releases ago. Same metric. Completely different problem.
Without qualitative context (customer interviews, support conversations, actually watching someone use the product), teams are reading signals without the story behind them.
The Fix Isn’t Fewer Metrics
Anandanadarajah isn’t calling for less measurement. He’s calling for better interpretation.
When a number moves, the productive question isn’t “did it go the right way?” It’s: what behaviour caused that, and is that behaviour actually what we want? Slower process. But it’s the one that produces something you can build on.
He also pushes companies to define success around customer outcomes — not product activity. Did users complete workflows that matter? Are they measurably better off? Those answers are harder to get. Much harder to game.
Where This Is All Heading
As SaaS markets tighten, shallow optimisation loses its cover. You can’t paper over weak retention with acquisition volume forever. At some point, the product has to actually work for people.
Anandanadarajah thinks the shift toward more disciplined use of SaaS metrics is already happening — not because companies got more thoughtful, but because the old approach stopped working.
That’s usually how change happens.
The companies that get ahead of it — pairing data with judgment, aligning teams around shared definitions of value, treating metrics as questions rather than conclusions — those are the ones who’ll have a real edge.
Not just a good-looking dashboard.
