I have a question about a heretofore unremarked upon bit of the post:

  It took our team a couple of months of work to add the counter. With the release of the update, I expectantly waited for an unmitigated success.

What in the great googly moogly? It takes months of work to add a progress bar?

  Armed with a short presentation I co-created with our chief designer, we were able to get just enough buy-in from the rest of the executive team to create a new team, the Gamification Team. The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.

Short presentations require chief designers? You need buy-in from the executive team to run simple experiments? A whole team of people?

  After the results came out, we quickly fell into dissension. Some wanted to continue iterating on the idea, while others wanted to pivot. The team almost immediately (and dramatically) disbanded, and the idea was abandoned. It was pretty awful. The one silver lining of this failure was that I learned a lot about the company culture and about how to improve my personal leadership style.

Fascinating.