I used to wonder why engineering teams are constantly bombarded with work. Why the backlog never shrinks, and why every day feels like a sprint.

After years in the industry, delivering projects and witnessing dozens of others, the realization finally hit me. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Much of the industry’s work is just “KPI Work.”

It’s work designed to satisfy a metric, not a user. It’s work created to justify a budget, not to solve a problem. These projects are launched, celebrated in slide decks, and then quietly left to rot because they have absolutely zero impact on anything that actually matters.

Instead of building a product, teams often end up building a paper trail of “achievement.”

Companies burn their best engineers on these hollow tasks just so someone can check a box at the end of the quarter. Architecture, stability, and sanity are sacrificed to maintain the illusion of progress.

It’s an exhausting cycle of moving at high speed toward a destination that doesn’t exist. If “Productivity” means being 100% utilized on projects that provide zero value, then we aren’t being productive. We’re just being busy while the ship stays in the same place.

The question shouldn’t be “How can we work faster?” The question must be “Why are we doing this at all?”

The Missing Feedback Loop

The most terrifying part of a KPI Work Factory isn’t the useless projects—it’s the total absence of a feedback loop.

When success is defined by ‘finishing’ rather than ‘solving,’ we lose our North Star. Without feedback from real-world performance metrics, we are flying blind. How can teams know where to improve if they don’t even know where they are? How can they iterate when they are already being forced to sprint toward the next hollow goal?

The irony is that in a culture of corporate ‘politeness,’ you’ll rarely hear the truth. If you have a good connection or if you’re just a decent colleague, no one will ever look you in the eye and say, “This system doesn’t actually solve our problem, and we never use it.”

They’ll just smile, thank you for the hard work, and let the project rot in silence.

In the absence of brutal, data-driven feedback, we aren’t just flying blind; we’re operating on a false premise.

Breaking the Cycle

To escape the KPI Work Factory, we have to start demanding to see the impact.

As engineers and product builders, we need to ask harder questions before the sprint even begins. What is the baseline metric we are trying to move? How will we measure adoption? What does failure look like for this feature?

If the answers aren’t clear, the project isn’t ready. We have to shift the culture from celebrating output to celebrating outcomes. Until we tie our engineering efforts to actual user value rather than internal scorecards, the factory will just keep humming along.