Most businesses measure success in terms of long-term outcomes: retention, subscriptions, lifetime value. Those are the right outcomes to care about. But they’re not the right signals for agents to learn from in real time.

An agent sending a message can’t directly observe retention six months later. What it can observe is whether the message shifted behavior in the short window after it was sent—whether engagement went up relative to what would have been expected otherwise.

Think of it like this:

➡️ In sales, you don’t judge every conversation by whether the prospect signs the contract that day. You judge by whether they lean in—showing up for calls, asking thoughtful questions, bringing in colleagues, pushing next steps forward.

➡️ In sports, you don’t evaluate every pass, tackle, or substitution by whether it produced a goal. You judge by whether it put your team in a stronger position to score later.

James Clear has a useful distinction here: goals set direction, but systems drive progress. If your only focus as a basketball coach is on winning the championship, that goal doesn’t tell you what to do on a Tuesday afternoon in practice. But if your system is well designed—consistent training, good recovery, thoughtful play design—the cumulative effect of those small improvements makes the goal much more likely to happen. The same logic applies in business: focusing exclusively on “retention” or “LTV” is like staring at the scoreboard. The real leverage comes from the system of feedback loops that tell you if you’re getting better each day.

That’s why our agents evaluate success directionally: did this message nudge the customer toward greater engagement than expected? Those directional signals accumulate and ultimately show up in long-term metrics like retention and LTV.