# Unknown and unknowable _The signals are there, just not on the dashboard._ --- Your customer health dashboard is green. NPS is 42, up from 38 last year. CSAT holds at 4.2. Support ticket resolution averages under four hours. The customer success team's quarterly report shows improvement across every metric. Q3 churn comes in at 8%, double the usual rate. Twelve customers gone. The dashboard said they were happy. --- You call five of them. One left because their new CTO wanted to consolidate vendors and your product didn't integrate with the platform they were standardising on. One left because the person who championed your product internally moved to a different role, and nobody else understood why they were paying for it. One left because a competitor's sales rep had been building a relationship with their CFO for six months. One left because they'd merged with another company that already had a competing product. One left because they'd outgrown you and your roadmap gave them no reason to wait. The metrics measured product satisfaction. Churn was driven by champion departures, vendor consolidation, competitive relationships, and strategic changes at the customer. Different layer entirely. --- You go back through the accounts. Some signals were readable, by a human who was paying attention. Your account manager had noticed the champion going quiet, shorter replies, two deferred renewal conversations. Your sales team had heard the CTO mention vendor consolidation in a pipeline call three months ago but nobody connected it to retention. Other signals were never going to show up anywhere. The competitor's sales rep had been cultivating a relationship with your customer's CFO over dinners and golf for six months. The board-level merger discussions that made your product redundant happened in rooms you'll never be in. No metric, no CRM note, no usage chart could have captured those. They were knowable only through the kind of conversation where someone trusts you enough to tell you what's really going on. --- "What gets measured gets managed" is terrible LinkedIn advice. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician who transformed Japanese and American manufacturing after WW2, had it right: the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable. ---