What does it mean that feedback loop hygiene?

Regularly check that your feedback loops are still connected to meaningful outcomes.

Example: A startup tracks 'daily active users' as its north-star metric. Six months later, the product team has optimized onboarding flows that inflate DAU by re-engaging churned users through dark patterns — push notification spam, confusing unsubscribe flows, auto-opening the app. DAU is up 40%. Actual user satisfaction, measured by NPS, has cratered. The feedback loop that once told the team 'people find this useful' now tells them 'people can't figure out how to leave.' The metric didn't break overnight. It decayed one optimization at a time.

Try this: Pick one metric you currently use to judge your own progress — at work, in a personal project, or in a habit. Ask three questions: (1) What behavior does this metric actually reward? (2) Is that behavior still aligned with the outcome I care about? (3) If I were gaming this metric, what would I do differently from what I'm doing now? If you can't distinguish your current behavior from gaming behavior, the loop needs maintenance.