The promise of data is its ability to reveal systemic connections, the input-output metric relationships in the business. But, we have “settled” for fragmented views of isolated metrics and dashboards.
For years, we’ve understood that when data is collected and analyzed methodically, it can offer a comprehensive view of the business ecosystem—how different functions like sales, marketing, product, operations, and finance interact to propel the business forward.
To realize this vision, significant investments have been made to consolidate raw data into unified data platforms such as Snowflake. Additional data modeling efforts convert these raw data assets into usable, extractable metrics.
However, while the back-end is increasingly unified and well modeled, the front-end consumption remains fragmented. Dashboards offer snapshots of key metrics, but they often present isolated views of specific metric cuts without the full context of how they connect to one another.
This fragmentation is exacerbated by three factors - a mix of tools and processes.
- It’s easier than ever to extract specific datasets and create charts. The well-intentioned effort to democratize access often ends up creating a swamp of disconnected dashboards.
- The most common pattern in analytics is to disaggregate or drill down into a metric creating various analysis paths, where each end up as discrete data assets or dashboards over time.
- Finally, different users across different domains contribute to further fragmentation, pulling apart or even redefining business metrics of interest to their immediate needs
As a result, organizations are left with a disjointed catalog of metrics and dashboards, forcing users to spend significant time piecing together insights from multiple sources.
This is where metric trees offer a powerful solution. By capturing the clear, structured relationships between metrics, metric trees create a unified, interconnected view of the data that reflects the underlying dynamics of the business.
For example, metric trees can easily model sales funnels or operational processes. They can link acquisition costs with retention metrics and ladder them up to a North Star growth metrics. They can connect heterogenous user states or revenue streams into a unified view of active users or total revenue.
This graph visualization instantly creates a more intuitive understanding of how various aspects of the business interconnect.
But, it goes beyond just visualization. We can leverage the power of software to automate workflows like root cause analysis on top of these metric trees.
Ultimately, metric trees transform the promise of unified, connected data into an operational reality, enabling organizations to fully realize the value of their data investments.
