Data strategy and planning
Most companies don't have a data problem. They have too many questions and no agreed order for answering them. We help you decide what to measure, where it should live and who owns it, then turn that into a plan your team can follow.
Signs you could use this
- Different teams quote different numbers for the same metric.
- You pay for several analytics tools and nobody is sure which one to believe.
- Every new report starts with someone asking an engineer to pull data.
- There is no written list of what you track, or why.
- Leadership wants more data-driven decisions but can't name the decisions.
What we do
- Audit what you have
- We list your tools, tables, dashboards and tracking, who uses each one and where they disagree. It is usually quicker than people expect, and it ends the argument about what exists.
- Start from the decisions
- We sit down with product, marketing, operations and finance and write down the decisions that depend on data. Then we rank them by value and effort, so the first project is the one that pays back.
- Write the metric definitions
- One definition per KPI, with its source, its owner and the edge cases. This single document removes more confusion than any dashboard.
- Draft a roadmap
- A three to six month plan with sequence, owners and rough effort, written so that someone other than us can run it.
What you receive
Usually two to four weeks, with the scope written down before we start. Many teams follow it with a build phase, with us or on their own.
- A short audit of your current data, tools and tracking
- A KPI dictionary your whole team can read
- A one-page picture of the target set-up
- A prioritised roadmap with owners
- A working session to walk your team through it
Tools we use: BigQuery, AWS Redshift, PostgreSQL, Airflow, Airbyte, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Power BI, Looker.
Common questions
How is this different from just building dashboards?
Dashboards show numbers. A strategy decides which numbers deserve a dashboard, how they are defined and who acts on them. Skipping it is why many companies end up with forty dashboards and no answers.
Do we need a data warehouse before we start?
No. Part of the work is deciding whether you need one yet. For some teams a well-organised spreadsheet and a clean tracking set-up is the right next step.
Will you push particular tools?
No. We recommend what fits your size, budget and the people who will maintain it, not what any vendor would like to sell.