Our strategy and design teams spent two hours debating whether custom illustrations performed better than stock photos. We gathered for a quarterly social media readout and compared clicks, discussed color changes, and sorted posts into categories. By the end of the meeting, we still couldn’t explain what caused the small differences in performance.

Our conclusion was to keep testing next quarter. Eventually, we thought we’d found a winning layout, so we put it into production and used it regularly. Within months, our creative work felt tired and predictable.

Chasing small engagement gains had narrowed our creative choices, and we still didn’t know whether those gains helped the business. That experience left me with a question I still come back to: When does performance data hinder making better creative decisions that actually grow the business?

The appeal of green arrows in a marketing dashboard

A dashboard full of rising numbers and green arrows gives everyone a hit of dopamine.…