Make BI Stand for Business Improvement
No items found.
Latest
Metric trees are gaining traction as a powerful way to provide clarity around key business metrics and growth opportunities. In our recent webinar, Ollie Hughes, CEO of Count, and Mitra Abrahams, Head of Customer Success at Count, walked us through a practical guide to building effective metric trees.
This session featured real audience questions, providing insights into common hurdles and practical solutions. Here are the questions we covered—and what you’ll learn from the answers.
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.
Mitra Abrahams: There's no strict rule, but aim for simplicity and clarity. The bottom of your metric tree should focus on metrics your team can directly influence. If it gets overly complex, ask yourself whether the additional detail genuinely helps you understand or affect your business outcomes.
Mitra Abrahams: Start by clearly defining your North Star metric—the primary number your organization cares most about improving. From there, break it down into influencing factors, then collaborate early and frequently with domain experts and senior stakeholders to refine your approach. Treat this as an iterative process rather than trying to build a perfect tree from the outset.
Ollie Hughes: It helps to demonstrate a side-by-side comparison between traditional dashboards and metric trees. Metric trees contextualize data clearly and succinctly, making it easier for leadership to understand impacts and actionable opportunities. You might consider building a prototype first and showcasing the practical benefits directly to your leadership team.
Mitra Abrahams: While querying directly from the database can offer a quick start, using a semantic layer (like Count's catalog) provides a long-term advantage. It ensures consistent metric definitions, standardizes calculations, and makes your data accessible and reusable for other stakeholders and use cases.
Mitra Abrahams: You have a few options. One approach is to include key dimensional splits directly within the metric tree cards or alongside them. Alternatively, you can set these as interactive filters for users to explore. Consider your audience—if they frequently dive into specific segments, make those visualizations prominent and easy to access.
Ollie Hughes: Absolutely! Metric trees—or more broadly, metric maps—can effectively visualize various processes like customer lifecycle, onboarding funnels, cash flow management, or retention cycles. They provide clarity by contextualizing metrics and clearly showing relationships and impacts within complex processes.
Mitra Abrahams: Build monitoring and alerts into your metric tree to regularly highlight significant changes or thresholds. Integrate your metric tree into routine reviews and discussions. It should become a core tool for diagnosing problems, exploring opportunities, and driving actionable insights within your organization.
Want to dive deeper into building a metric tree? Watch the full webinar to see exactly how to build and leverage one in your organization.
