Comment by CobrastanJorji

Also a great example of leadership by lower level leaders, or higher level leaders with shorter term thinking. You see this pattern happen at bigger companies all the time.

If you're the VP or whatever in charge of the new font launch, your performance is measured on how many people pick up the new font. You are happy to sacrifice anything else your company is doing to make your launch succeed even slightly more because it is the only thing you are evaluated on. If you send out a spammy promotional email to the entire subscriber base, and it causes 20% of your email list to unsubscribe, but it also gets 2% of them to click through and buy something, that is an absolute win for you, the lower level leader. It's disastrous for the company, but that's not what you're being evaluated on.

Whenever I see a company do something that seems like it's sacrificing some long term brand trust for short term gains, I see a misincentivized middle manager.

You think your favorite app has a "WE ADDED AI" button because the users were clamoring for it? No, of course not. But some executive somewhere is being judged on customer adoption of the new AI feature, and so now the AI is the biggest button on the screen, to the detriment of the overall usability of the app.