Make BI Stand for Business Improvement
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When OKRs don’t stick, teams can feel like they’re doing a lot of work without moving the business forward. That’s exactly the challenge Intruder faced—and in our recent webinar, their leadership team shared how they rebuilt their OKR process around live data to create real alignment.
The session featured:
The conversation was full of practical lessons about how to make OKRs actionable, connected to real metrics, and genuinely useful for decision-making.
Below, we’ve pulled out some of the most valuable host and audience questions—and the answers Intruder’s team shared.
Note: Some of the answers may have been paraphrased and condensed for ease of reading. We've included some video clips in the article, but you can watch the full webinar to get the full, unedited answers.
Andy Hornegold, VP Product at Intruder: We often hit our key results but didn’t see the business outcomes move. For example, projects shipped on time, yet retention barely changed. Part of the issue was tool sprawl: OKRs lived in Lattice, but metrics were tracked elsewhere. That disconnect meant green checkmarks without real impact.
Aadam Sarkar, Head of Data at Intruder: The turning point came when different teams couldn’t agree on what the numbers meant. Leadership realized we needed one central, live view of objectives and results. That’s when we shifted to Count—bringing OKRs and business metrics into the same space.
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Andy Hornegold: There’s always debate about what the North Star should be. For some businesses, it’s product usage or engagement. For us, as a bootstrapped company, it had to be annual recurring revenue (ARR). Revenue is the clearest signal that we’re growing sustainably. We discussed alternatives, but agreed ARR was the right anchor.
What makes it powerful in Count is that it’s not just a static number—we see both the year-end target and month-by-month milestones, updated live from our database. That way, we always know if we’re on track, and the system gives a clear thumbs up or down based on progress.
Andy Hornegold: At the top we have our North Star, and then underneath sit the objectives we’re driving toward. We used to reset these every quarter, but that just created a rushed cycle. Now we set them annually, and only change direction if something significant shifts.
Each of our four objectives spans the whole business, and different teams contribute in their own ways. For example, increasing market share involves both marketing initiatives and product development for new features. We keep it simple—no more than four objectives—because too many quickly becomes unmanageable.
Beneath these objectives sit the key results and KPIs, all powered by live data. That’s what really differentiates this system. Anyone in the company can open the dashboard and see, from the top North Star down through the objectives into the KPIs, exactly where we are today and where we’re headed.
David Koke, Head of Marketing at Intruder: The OKR canvas has become our agenda. Every two weeks, the leadership team reviews progress straight from the live board. Each of us owns specific metrics, so we talk through the numbers, add commentary, and make course corrections on the spot. It keeps the conversation grounded in facts, not guesswork.
Andy Hornegold: Each department has its own metric tree—a more detailed view of the drivers they control. For example, in Product, our North Star is the number of critical vulnerabilities we help customers find and fix. That tree helps us diagnose issues quickly and then link back to the company-wide objectives.
David Koke: Exposure is key. In marketing, we use the same dashboard in our weekly meetings as we do in leadership reviews. That consistency helps everyone see how their work contributes. It’s not a “leadership-only” tool—it’s something the whole team engages with.
Andy Hornegold: We also reinforce the “why” behind projects every week. It can feel repetitive, but it helps everyone stay aligned on how their work connects to business outcomes.
Aadam Sarkar: We’re three people supporting a 60-person company. The key is giving ownership back to leaders. Product and Marketing build a lot of their own metric trees. The data team provides the models and semantic layer, but department heads are empowered to build and explore within Count.
Aadam Sarkar: We already had a warehouse in place before rolling this out. The real work was mapping strategy documents into measurable metrics and making sure definitions were agreed across teams. And we’re still evolving—it’s not a “done” project, it’s a living process.
Aadam Sarkar: Ownership sits with the true metric owners. For example, Andy built out the product metric tree using our warehouse and dbt models, while David quickly spun up his own marketing metrics catalog when he joined. That’s by design—we want leaders to be able to own their own data.
Our data team is just three people in a 60-person company. We span the whole pipeline: ingestion, modeling, and then helping teams analyze results. But as much as possible, we push responsibility back to the department leads. By taking them through the process end-to-end, they not only get the metrics they need, they also understand exactly how they’re built and what they mean.
Intruder’s journey shows how shifting from static OKR tools to a live, data-driven system can transform how teams align and make decisions. By connecting strategy directly to metrics, every leader and team member can see the bigger picture and their role in moving it forward.
If you’d like to go deeper, you can watch the full webinar replay—and better yet, start experimenting with this system yourself. We've added Intruder's OKR tracker, product metrics map, and marketing metrics map canvases to our Gallery to help you get setup as quickly as possible.
