Trust & governance

Earning trust in the numbers

Trust in a data platform is lost two ways: slowly, when everyone learns to live with numbers that never match, and all at once, when one confidently wrong number lands in a visible setting. Treating quality as a discipline rather than a side effect.

• →One wrong number can drop trust in a single step: protect the step
• →Cover the numbers your most skeptical stakeholder uses, first

One customer, four acquisition stories

Marketing counted a click, finance counted the cash, product counted the first visit, and the payment data counted attempts that never became orders. All four were right. The decision was not to pick a winner but to publish four named measures with owners, and to say which decision each one serves.

• →Attribution is four questions wearing one word; answer them separately and name each one
• →A blended number nobody can explain loses to named measures somebody owns

Changing the metric without erasing the decision

A better definition can make the same history tell a different story. Who approves the change, when it applies, how to compare periods, and what to preserve about the decisions made under the old one.

After the wrong number has been used

A corrected dashboard does not update the staffing plan made from it. Following a data error into the decisions it reached, returning the choice to its owner, and making the cost of recovery visible.

Catalog, discovery, observability, governance

Four words used interchangeably that mean four different things, and what actually stops pipelines breaking. Written in 2024, and the part that changed once the thing querying the warehouse stopped being a person.