Argue in the number the room is watching

Early on at Binance Academy, leadership wanted to pay users to complete lessons. I thought it was a bad fit for an education brand: paying people to read attracts people who want to be paid. I made that case. The campaign ran anyway.

Both of us were right.

What happened

Activity jumped: sign-ups, page views, completions. When the rewards stopped, most of that cohort left. As a retention play it was weak. As a marketing campaign it was one of the strongest the platform ran.

That's the point. There was no contradiction. We were measuring different things. I was looking at who stayed; the business was looking at how many arrived, that quarter. Judged by its own goal, the campaign worked.

The lesson

My argument was about user quality. Nobody had asked me to move user quality. I'd walked into a decision about a marketing number carrying a product opinion, and an opinion doesn't get a vote against a KPI.

What does get a vote is a forecast in the same currency. "This will bring the wrong users" is a view. "I expect this cohort's 30-day retention to land well below organic, here's how we measure it, and here's what we do with the traffic while it's here" is a plan. One gets overruled. The other gets instrumented, and then the data argues for you.

What I do now

• Find the number before the meeting. What does this need to move, by when, and who owns it? Argue about that number or don't argue.
• Convert objections into forecasts. Name the metric you think will suffer, the size of the effect, and how you'd check. Then you're adding information, not friction.
• If it runs, make it useful. A spike of new users is still an opportunity. Capture them, learn from them, measure what they do. Blocking a campaign wins nothing; instrumenting it wins the next decision.
• Know which calls are yours. Whether to run a campaign was a marketing call. How the product handled the users it brought was mine. Spend effort where the decision is actually yours.

Why it matters

Product judgement is only half the job. The other half is knowing what the organisation is optimising for and speaking in that unit. Once I started doing that, I lost fewer arguments, and the ones I lost stopped bothering me, because I understood why.

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