How a Gamedev CTO Built KPIs for Six Teams Without Triggering Goodhart's Law

A CTO managing six gamedev teams needed a way to monitor team health and delegate responsibility without micromanaging daily operations. The core challenge was designing KPIs that measured genuine outcomes rather than numbers that leads could game, a pitfall described by economist Charles Goodhart's decades-old principle. A concrete trigger was that stability issues like crashes and ANRs were going unaddressed because no one owned them — features had deadlines and owners, but stability metrics had neither. Rather than slicing the CTO's existing KPIs into shares distributed downward, the approach focused first on defining what each lead was actually responsible for within the broader direction. The resulting framework aimed to give leads clarity on expectations and genuine ownership of their zone, rather than metrics they only partly influenced and could defend against with reports.