Once we really ramped up production and quotas for the developers, all upper management wanted were sites to be done and out the door. Hence, every month became a "production push". The managers work at the time was basically to monitor all the daily metrics like:

1 - how many sites did you get done yesterday?

2 - how many sites are in the queue?

3 - what was your QA defect rate? (this was eventually given to an off shore team, so we were no longer responsible for our own defects, which was totally bizarre to me)

4 - How close to your monthly goal were you?

5 - where were you with your professional development goals?

6 - what percentage of your goal were "refreshes" or sites that were re-designed and revamped?

There were a ton more I can't remember right now, but those were sent out in a daily email, in a list, to show were you ranked with your fellow developers. It was very outside sales like, so this really backfired on how developers took it. Most were very "fuck this, this shit is stupid" and performed really poorly under pressure and being micromanaged every day.

So once the only thing that mattered was just pumping sites out regardless of quality, then all the metrics became useless and the emails and micromanaging stopped. You were still handed a huge quota to hit every month though and many developers were burning out, getting put on PIPS and even without all the micromanaging, it was still a meat grinder.