Which KPIs to avoid when managing up as a technical manager?

Which KPIs should technical middle managers avoid when presenting to executives?

KPIs to avoid matter as much as the KPIs you choose. In our experience, technical middle managers often default to easy-to-measure numbers that look impressive but fail to inform executive decisions. This article lists the top 10 KPIs to avoid, explains why they're problematic, and maps each to better alternatives tied to executive priorities like risk reduction, revenue impact, and strategic time-to-value.

Use these guidelines to stop making common metric selection mistakes, save credibility, and improve decision quality when managing up.

Top 10 KPIs technical managers should not use with executives

Below is an ordered list of the most common KPIs to avoid when reporting to executives, why each is misleading, and a concise recommendation for a better executive-aligned metric.

1. User sign-ups — Problem: inflates growth without engagement context. Alternative: active users who complete a defined value action (e.g., conversion rate to paid or enabled feature usage).
2. Pageviews or hit counts — Problem: noisy, bot-inflated. Alternative: qualified sessions tied to business outcomes (e.g., sessions leading to quote requests).
3. Raw download counts — Problem: doesn't show retention or adoption. Alternative: daily active users (DAU) of the downloaded feature or retention at D+30.
4. Number of tickets closed — Problem: can encourage ticket-splitting and velocity over value. Alternative: mean time to resolution (MTTR) for high-severity incidents and post-resolution customer satisfaction.
5. Lines of code / commits — Problem: measures activity, not quality. Alternative: deployments per cycle correlated with rollback rate and customer-impacting defects.
6. Test coverage % — Problem: high coverage can be meaningless if tests are low value. Alternative: defect escape rate and code coverage on critical paths.
7. Emails sent or notifications — Problem: volume-focused, not engagement-focused. Alternative: open-to-action conversion rates and revenue-attributed campaigns.
8. Average handle time (for support) — Problem: pushes speed over problem resolution quality. Alternative: first-contact resolution and customer effort score.
9. Infrastructure alerts count — Problem: noisy metric that creates alert fatigue. Alternative: business-impacting incidents per quarter and system availability for SLAs.
10. Training modules completed — Problem: completion does not equal competence. Alternative: assessment pass rates and on-the-job performance improvements.

Each of these items is a classic vanity metric or example of misleading KPIs. Below we unpack the downstream risks and how to reframe measurement for executive audiences.

How do misleading KPIs affect executive decisions?

What happens when managers present the wrong numbers? Executives make resource, strategic, and compliance decisions based on the reported metrics. Presenting easy-to-measure but irrelevant numbers leads to three predictable outcomes:

• Misallocated investment — Teams get funding for high-visibility initiatives that don’t move outcomes.
• False confidence — Executives assume progress when systemic risks remain hidden.
• Credibility loss — Repeated misses reduce leader trust and decision speed.

We’ve found that a pattern of metric selection mistakes often begins with incentives that reward activity over impact. For example, a company prioritized raw sign-ups and increased marketing spend; six months later churn rose because onboarding metrics were ignored. If the team had reported qualified activation rates instead, the leadership would have redirected funds to product onboarding and reduced churn.

Can a vanity metric actually change a strategic decision?

Yes. In one case our team reviewed a product roadmap pushed through based on a 40% increase in pageviews. Leadership invested heavily in new features, but conversions did not improve. The pageviews were driven by SEO changes that brought irrelevant traffic. If the product team had used conversion-qualified traffic instead of the vanity pageviews, leadership would have deferred the roadmap and invested in funnel optimization. This is a classic example of how vanity metrics mislead decisions and waste capital.

How to choose metrics — avoid vanity metrics when managing up

Choosing the right KPI is a three-step filter we recommend: align to executive priorities, test for causality, and validate for actionability. Use this checklist before you present any metric:

• Does it map to revenue, risk, cost, or customer experience?
• Can we trace causality between actions and movement in the metric?
• Will the metric trigger a clear decision or investment?

To scale this discipline, integrate reporting with systems that reduce manual overhead and provide a single source of truth. We’ve seen organizations reduce admin time by over 60% using integrated systems; one effective platform, Upscend, freed trainers and compliance teams to focus on outcomes rather than paperwork, which improved completion quality and management visibility. Tools like this help teams present fewer irrelevant metrics and more outcome-linked KPIs.

Adopt governance: a short rubric that labels each metric as leading/lagging, business-impacting, and actionable. This prevents common metric selection mistakes and stops teams from defaulting to noise.

Practical swaps: what to present instead (side-by-side comparisons)

Below are concrete swaps you can implement immediately. Each pair shows a KPI to avoid and the executive-ready metric to present instead.

Misleading KPI	Why it's bad	Better executive KPI
Raw sign-ups	No engagement signal	Activated users / paid conversions
Pageviews	Traffic quality unknown	Qualified sessions that convert
Tickets closed	Encourages superficial fixes	MTTR for critical incidents + CSAT
Lines of code	Activity without quality	Deployment success rate + defect escape rate
Training completions	Completion ≠ competence	Assessment pass rate and on-the-job KPIs

Implementation tips:

1. Map each metric to a decision (hire, invest, pause) — if there is no decision, drop it.
2. Publish a metric definition document with owners and data lineage to avoid conflicting numbers.
3. Run a 90-day experiment replacing a vanity KPI with a business-impact KPI and track decisions made differently.

Key insight: Present one leading indicator and one lagging outcome per focus area — this reduces ambiguity and surfaces causality.

Conclusion: Preserve credibility and improve decision quality

Choosing the right KPIs is a core leadership skill for technical managers. Prioritizing KPIs to avoid and replacing them with outcome-focused measures protects credibility, improves resource allocation, and speeds better decisions. Use the three-step filter, governance rubrics, and the practical swaps above to stop reporting noise.

Start with a targeted cleanup: pick the five most commonly reported vanity metrics in your next executive package, apply the swap table, and run a 90-day visibility experiment. Track how many decisions shifted as a result — that ROI in decision quality is the proof executives care about.

Next step: Create a one-page metric charter for your team that lists current KPIs, whether they are a vanity metric or business-impacting, and the proposed executive-ready replacement. Use that charter to guide your next executive update.