How about customer-centric culture? One where UX is #1, and not out of sight?
> Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
This!
It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else. Understanding that all the stakeholders in your organization are doing something important that allows everyone to have a place to come to work to tomorrow is critical for you as the engineer.
It sounds very good on paper but it doesn't really work in practice because devs are generally not recognized as important decision makers in product design, despite said "broad vantage point".
From there, it's a rather thankless uphill battle of the "no good deed will go unpunished" variety. It's a very misaligned situation.
The need for metrics is another way of saying "I don't trust you", which may be understandable to a degree but stakeholders should also understand that not everything can be measured, and that measuring things in a manner that is both accurate and useful is very hard. I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project. We don't have very good results with measuring other vague things, why would software development be any different?
That's a rather odd statement to hear from a dev (or developer advocate) because I've always heard fellow engineers talk about how data is more important than opinion. Why is this an exception?
I think the UX is the most important thing, without it (i.e., a good one) there is no profit.
In 2018 bosses involved in web - directly or indirectly - should be well aware of this. At this point in time the web dev's job should not be to "fix" those above them. There's plenty else to do and keep up with qithout having to add risking their career to the list.
And few if any freelancers are going to speak up. Which is all the more reason the decision makers should understand the implications of their decisions.