Growth through building trust in data
Cutting through the fog of organizational complexity is one of the keys to scaling growth. The most potent tool to achieve this? A trusted and believable set of metrics. Yet over two decades in politics and scaling startups, I've seen a consistent pattern: organizations rarely suffer from lack of data, they suffer from lack of trusted data.
I’ve seen data misalignment crush growth potential far too often. Marketing groups operate on Google-derived data while finance uses hard revenue numbers. Different departments measure key conversion events through their own lens, leading to different and often competing versions of truth. Paid attribution is regularly broken, forcing teams to rely on inaccurate inferences and inevitable acquisition inefficiencies. The resulting environment can be a breeding ground for mistrust, infighting and stagnation.
So how do high-performing organizations avoid this trap? Here’s what I’ve seen the best teams do to build a data culture rooted in trust and alignment.
1. Normalize transparency around data gaps. When teams openly acknowledge measurement, attribution and tracking challenges, it creates space for cross-functional problem solving. This can spark an internal mission to drive towards collective solutions.
2. Align on achievable cross-team initiatives. A group of stakeholders get together to envision improved tracking, reporting and attribution. Small optimizations to existing systems can often trigger larger innovation and modernization initiatives.
3. Align tracking upgrades with business outcomes. Better tracking doesn’t just improve data quality and decision making - it can enable growth across the board. For instance, better 1st party event analytics can generate immediate wins by allowing what is tracked to be used to support best practices around testing, targeting & personalization at scale.
The shift from messy to trusted data isn't a single technical fix - it's an ongoing commitment to transparency and alignment. The good news is that with modern tooling like reverse ETL, cost-efficient customer data platforms, and AI-powered analysis, trusted data is more accessible than ever. The organizations that win tomorrow will be the ones building trust in their metrics right now.
