This allowed them to construct a metric that pitted quality-driven improvements to short-term user engagement against latency-driven damage to long-term user engagement. This approach allows us to make more data-driven decisions about product changes. For example, if a small change improves quality but also hurts latency, we can quantitatively decide whether the change is worth launching or not.
Quality-driven and latency-driven weren't even the bottom line metrics. Short-term and long-term engagement metrics were.
In other words, you could have bypassed the quality vs latency test and evaluated against what were apparently the actual trade-off metrics: engagement.
