Building a Soviet Nail Factory: how KPIs killed efficiency

In 2008, I landed my second job, in the network team at Orange Portails, the division behind the websites and search engine of the French telecom operator Orange. The place ran like clockwork: a comprehensive technical setup, a dedicated team for every part of the business, and room to focus on what I do best. A few years later, none of that mattered: thanks to an obsession with the numbers, we could no longer deliver new services on time. Disclaimer This is a story I like to tell to warn people about Goodhart’s law.1 As these events happened almost 15 years ago, my recollection is a bit fuzzy. I left in 2012. The first years During my first years, the department operated like a startup. Its cradle was the French company Echo. They built a search engine. France Télécom bought it and renamed it Voila. It was the most visited search engine in France in the early 2000s. France Télécom consolidated the portal activities into the Wanadoo Portails division, later renamed Orange Portails.…