The Boredom Metric

At a Glance

• Customers don’t churn because products fail - they churn because progress stalls

• Boredom shows up as declining depth of usage, not angry feedback 

• Shadow AI is a modern signal of disengagement, not rebellion 

• Great teams fix friction before shipping shiny features 

• Small improvements to core workflows beat big launches every time

Hey folks,

Most teams look for churn signals in the obvious places: support tickets, outages, broken features. By the time those show up, though, it’s usually already too late.

Customers tend to leave long before anything breaks. They leave when the product stops helping them move forward, when it no longer teaches, challenges, or unlocks something new for them.

They leave because they’re bored.

Boredom doesn’t look like anger

Recently, I upgraded my iPhone for the first time in six years. I was expecting something different - a breakthrough, or at least a reason to explore.

Instead, I transferred my data, opened the apps, and thought: “Oh. It’s an iPhone.”

Nothing was wrong. Nothing was broken. But, $1500 later,  I wasn’t doing anything differently than I had been before.

I’m deeply locked into the Apple ecosystem, so I’m not going anywhere. But for customers who aren’t? That quiet sense of “this doesn’t do more for me anymore” is a real risk. That’s what boredom looks like.

What boredom actually looks like in behavior

Customer boredom rarely shows up as complaints or angry feedback. Instead, it reveals itself through subtle behavioral drift.

People may still log in, but they use fewer features. Power users stop exploring. Beginners plateau early and never grow. Workflows get completed less often. Outcome metrics stagnate, even while top-line numbers still look “fine.”

The product still works, it just stops being the place where real thinking happens. And when that happens, customers start doing their thinking somewhere else.

What great teams do differently

Great teams don’t start by asking, “What should we build next?” They start by asking, “What’s getting in our customers’ way right now?” or "What are the highest value opportunities for us right now?"

Instead of chasing novelty, they focus on progress.

A simple place to begin is to pick one customer segment and one core workflow, then ask these 3 questions:

1. Where do customers get stuck?

2. Where do they plateau?

3. What’s preventing them from moving forward?

You’re not hunting for bugs. You’re looking for opportunities where the product fails to teach, motivate, or unlock value. Fixing even one of those moments, sometimes with a very small change, can do more for engagement than shipping a brand-new feature.

The Bottom Line

Customers don’t leave because your product is broken. They leave because it stops helping them get better at what they’re trying to do.

Boredom is the leading indicator. Behavior is the signal. Progress is the antidote.

Want to Go Deeper?

This is the kind of work we tackle in Sense & Respond Learning workshops - helping teams focus on outcomes, behavior change and real progress instead of feature velocity.