A metric is not the mission

A metric exists to tell you whether things are going well. The moment it becomes the goal, it stops measuring and starts distorting: teams optimize for what gets measured and drop what matters, because what matters was never on the spreadsheet.

The most uncomfortable case is an organization full of excellent teams that fails anyway. Each one is genuinely improving something, with effort and judgment, but what one team improves complicates the next team's work. No one is individually wrong, and the whole loses.

That's why, before defining the indicator, you need to define the context: what are we actually trying to achieve as a company, and what behavior do we want this number to produce. If the number can be hit by doing something we don't want, the number was chosen badly.