Instead of a universal definition, "real progress" is achieved by first defining what change you want to see in your organization. You then adapt your ways of working—strategy, discovery, OKRs—to support that specific goal, rather than just following a generic playbook.

To get buy-in for developer experience initiatives, don't use generic metrics. First, identify leadership's primary concerns—be it market share, profit margin, or velocity. Then, frame your measurements and impact using that specific language to ensure your work resonates.

Stakeholders will ask "so what?" if you only talk about developer efficiency. This is a weak argument that can get your funding cut. Instead, connect your platform's work directly to downstream business metrics like customer retention or product uptake that your developer-users are targeting.

To solve misalignment, the company cascaded OKRs from the CEO down. Critically, regional leaders were made 'champions' of key pillars like user acquisition. This gave them ownership and a direct voice in shaping product solutions, turning potentially adversarial relationships into collaborative partnerships.

Most business struggles stem from a misaligned or forgotten North Star Metric (NSM). A successful framework aligns the entire company by ensuring all OKRs ladder up to a single, durable NSM, with KPIs serving as health checks for those OKRs. This creates a clear hierarchy for decision-making and resource allocation, preventing strategic drift.

Teams often focus on perfectly implementing frameworks like OKRs or Discovery, creating a false sense of achievement. This "alibi progress" prioritizes methodology correctness over creating value in a specific context, leading to lots of outputs but no outcomes.

Shift your team's language from tracking output (e.g., 'deployed XYZ API') to tracking outcomes. Reframe milestones to focus on the business capability you have 'unlocked' for other teams. This small linguistic change reorients the team toward business impact and clarifies your contribution to metrics like NPS.

Escape the trap of chasing top-line revenue. Instead, make contribution margin (revenue minus COGS, ad spend, and discounts) your primary success metric. This provides a truer picture of business health and aligns the entire organization around profitable, sustainable growth rather than vanity metrics.

Open and click rates are ineffective for measuring AI-driven, two-way conversations. Instead, leaders should adopt new KPIs: outcome metrics (e.g., meetings booked), conversational quality (tracking an agent's 'I don't know' rate to measure trust), and, ultimately, customer lifetime value.