Make BI Stand for Business Improvement
Data isn't your problem. Clarity is.
Businesses today are swimming in dashboards, metrics, and endless streams of information. Yet many find themselves overwhelmed rather than empowered.
But how do you sift through the noise to bring clarity and actionable insights sure to actually move the business forward? A question MoonPay’s Emily Loh and Matthew Reuvers provided the answer to in a recent Count webinar.
They shared how MoonPay made the shift from data chaos to operational clarity and needle-moving insights by creating a metric tree as their single source of truth.
In this post, we summarize the top five takeaways from Emily and Matthew. Here’s what you need to know to start turning abundant data into strategic clarity.
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The webinar itself goes into much more detail. But here are the cliff notes and overarching key points you need to remember to start making a similar shift MoonPay did:
“We had too much data, and yet we were missing focus,” Emily admitted.
Like many startups, MoonPay had invested in the best-in-class data stack (DBT, Looker, Airflow, GCP) and hired a talented data team. But despite all the dashboards and reports, they found themselves chasing every metric and reacting to every blip – without clear prioritization.
💡 Key takeaway: If your team feels constantly reactive, buried in requests, or unsure what really moves the needle, it’s time to rethink how you organize and interpret data.
MoonPay’s turning point came when the team implemented metric trees – a structured, hierarchical way of breaking down top-line goals (like revenue) into the specific, actionable metrics that drive them.
Matthew shared, “Before metric trees, we’d spend weeks debugging issues without knowing where to start. Now, we can pinpoint exactly which area needs attention – whether it’s new customer acquisition, transaction success rates, or regional performance.”
💪 Why it works: Metric trees bring clarity, showing the relationships between metrics and allowing teams to drill down quickly to root causes.
Traditionally, data teams are seen as service providers: pulling reports, answering questions, running ad hoc analyses. MoonPay flipped this script.
Emily explained, “We stopped waiting for others to come to us with problems. Instead, we proactively identified issues and opportunities, using the metric tree as our guide. This shifted the data team from reactive firefighters to strategic partners.”
🚀 Pro tip: Give your data team ownership. Let them drive conversations about what matters most and where to focus resources.
Rather than imposing metrics top-down, MoonPay let each data scientist own their domain (e.g., payments, compliance, customer acquisition) and define the key metrics in that area.
Over six weeks, the team came together to build a unified tree that aligned to company goals.
🔥 Lesson: Start with the experts closest to the data. Bottom-up construction fosters buy-in, ensures accuracy, and helps surface what truly matters.
MoonPay didn’t just build a static metric tree and call it a day. They made sure it evolved with the business, adding layers of detail (like product-specific or region-specific trees) as needed.
Emily emphasized, “It’s not just about having the metrics – it’s about using them. We use the tree for opportunity sizing, prioritization, and driving cross-functional conversations. It lets us focus on outcomes, not just outputs.”
🙌 The result: A faster, clearer improvement cycle where the data team leads the charge, and the entire business rallies around shared priorities.
MoonPay’s story is a powerful example of how a data-driven company can fall into the trap of too much data – and how the right frameworks can bring back focus and clarity.
By using metric trees, MoonPay transformed its data team into a strategic powerhouse, driving decisions and growth across the company.
Want to dive deeper? Watch the full webinar with Emily and Matthew to see how they built their metric trees, overcame challenges, and reshaped the way MoonPay uses data to win.