What is what gets measured gets managed?

What gets measured gets managed is a concept in personal epistemology: If you cannot measure an outcome you cannot build a feedback loop around it.

Example: A software team ships features for six months but tracks only deployment count — not user adoption, error rates, or latency. They have motion without feedback. When they finally instrument their application with metrics, logging, and tracing, they discover that 40% of their shipped features are unused and two endpoints are silently failing. The act of measuring transformed a blind process into a self-correcting one.

This concept is part of Phase 24 (Feedback Loops) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for feedback loops.