Metrics can tell you where to focus, but they can’t tell you how the work feels to a customer. Too often, teams fall into the trap of optimizing for numbers alone—pushing buttons into modals, forcing clicks, nudging behaviors—while forgetting the experience those numbers represent.
I faced this head-on while leading activation design at Dropbox. The challenge wasn’t just to move the metric—it was to bring the customer back into the process.
The Problem
Our team’s focus was activation. Data pointed us toward opportunities like increasing team member invites. The solutions we were exploring? Growthy quick fixes, like forcing the invite button into a modal during onboarding. They might have bumped numbers, but they weren’t designed with the customer’s experience in mind.
Our approach lacked customer focus, and I knew it would eventually hurt both the user journey and the business.
The Approach
Because research bandwidth was thin, I decided to bring customer focus directly into the design team’s practice. My research partner and I asked product design ICs to take ownership of customer conversations themselves.
We created a lightweight ritual: every two weeks, a design IC would lead a competitive onboarding audit. They’d share their observations with the design team, our researcher, and one or two non-design partners who would challenge assumptions. The point wasn’t to copy features—it was to extract principles from what worked elsewhere.
The team drew inspiration from everywhere—Fortnite, Spotify, even the experience of getting into a Tesla. Designers then built prototypes that highlighted those principles, which we tested with users. With research support, we focused conversations on sentiment and principles, not just tasks.
The Principles
From this ritual, the team distilled principles that became touchstones for our work:
- Give the customer control.
- Be transparent.
- Give more than you take.
By rooting our designs in these principles, the team shifted its mindset. Instead of just asking, How do we increase invites? they started asking, How does this feel for the customer?
The Results
The impact was clear. Designers were more aligned. Conversations shifted from growth hacks to experiences. Our prototypes not only tested better with customers but also inspired more thoughtful debate across product and engineering.
Customer centricity went from being a vague aspiration to a concrete part of the team’s everyday process.
Metrics measure outcomes, but principles shape experiences. Balance both, and you get solutions that last.