Technical teams measure quality in terms they can control: latency percentiles, error rates, test coverage, deployment frequency. These are proxies. They are proxies for the underlying goal, which is that users accomplish something they wanted to accomplish, faster or more reliably than they could before.
The gap opens because proxies are easier to measure than outcomes. An engineer can verify that a function returns the correct output for a given input in milliseconds. Verifying that a user accomplishes their goal requires watching the user, which is slow, qualitative, and uncomfortable for people trained in precision.
The result is a systematic bias. Technical teams over-invest in properties they can measure and under-invest in the ones they cannot. A codebase with 95% test coverage may have zero tests that verify the user actually completed their task. A CI/CD pipeline that deploys twelve times a day may be deploying features that users ignore.
This is not a competence failure. It is a measurement failure. What gets measured gets managed.