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Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people
(www.fastcompany.com)
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That sucks. A rigid KPI that is never open to change and only made to show some BLING in meetings, it will always lead to failure.
And when the KPIs are bad, they blame us. We had lots of failures in streaming videos on our platform and it was growing across a range of mobile OSs and devices, and they would just say, very sternly, "We need you to deliver better results!". Meanwhile, they had us do a huge migration and rebuild the entire UI across all devices all while maintaining the legacy systems that are sometimes riddled with bugs. Fucking idiots! They shouldn't expect X performance with Y² the number of tasks (I would have said 2*Y if it was "double" the work... it was more like being on steroids, it was Y² the work, everyone was burnt out, people barely took the summer off). We met those KPIs by a margin previously, and we're not about to meet them now unless they hire more staff or give us more time until their new UI launch. Spoiler: the launch did not go well.
Yeah, that’s always been my experience with KPIs, too.
It’s always turned into a game for managers - they don’t have the ability to actually improve the product, so the measurements change or they add an extra field in the ticket…
My first job was as a cashier and we were trained to press the calculate button on the register after each item we scanned. Did that make the checkout go faster? Nope. Did it make their measurement look better? Yeah, since that wasn’t “checkout time” in their report
At another job, patches weren’t merged fast enough. So, instead of making any changes that would improve the product, we were ordered to make one ticket for investigating the problem and a second for integrating the fix. It made fixing issues slower, but their KPIs went up…