Renewal rates held. Satisfaction scores look fine. Your product is losing ground anyway.
The Sidebar piece makes a case that lagging indicators like renewals and NPS mask real-time shifts in user expectations. Customers stay because switching costs are high, not because you are winning. The gap between what users tolerate and what they now consider baseline grows quietly, and your dashboards show nothing until churn spikes.
The argument worth reading in full is not the conclusion but the diagnostic: which signals actually surface expectation drift before it becomes a retention problem, and why the metrics most product teams trust are structurally blind to this specific failure mode.
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