The metric nobody tracks: did your product make the user need it less?

Every product dashboard I've ever seen tracks the same things: DAU, session length, retention, engagement loops. All of them answer one question — is the user coming back?

But lately I've been thinking about a different question: is the user outgrowing us?

At Murror, we're building AI that helps people prepare for difficult conversations. And the strange thing is, our best users use us less over time. They come in anxious before a tough talk with a partner or a manager. They work through it. They go have the real conversation. And then they don't open the app again — until the next hard moment, weeks later.

By every traditional SaaS metric, that looks like churn. But by the metric that actually matters — did this person get better at something hard? — it looks like success.

I think this is an uncomfortable truth for a lot of product builders: if your product genuinely solves a problem, some users should need it less. A language learning app that works should eventually produce people who don't need a language learning app. A fitness app that works should build habits that outlast the subscription.

Yet almost nobody optimizes for this. The incentive structure pushes the other way — toward stickiness, dependency, infinite scroll, and "just one more session."

I'm not saying retention doesn't matter. Of course it does. But I wonder if we're measuring the wrong kind of retention. Maybe the question isn't "did they come back today?" but "when they come back next month, is it because they want to — or because they have to?"

Curious if anyone else is building products where user independence is the goal. How do you think about growth when your success metric works against traditional engagement?