Cross-company data to cross-company clarity - Count at Runa

Limited by grids of tiles. In desperate need of visual flexibility

"Every dashboard request became a laundry list of unfocused metrics that didn't conform to any aligned understanding of how the business actually works"

Runa's data team faced a common problem: their existing BI tool could not visualize metrics as interconnected systems, making it difficult for the business to see the bigger picture. Without the ability to connect everything together into a joined up story, dashboards grew as bundles of unfocused metrics which were quickly discarded.

“ We couldn’t visualize metrics as an interconnected system. The idea of metric trees or process flows is something that I've used in the past with other tools and where we knew we wanted to get to”.

As a result, there was no centralized view of Runa's growth mechanics. Different teams used their own reports, and worked on priorities that weren’t always aligned to the business’ growth levers. The BI tool made everything visible to everyone, but not always useful to everyone. Without a single source of truth for  growth mechanics, it could be challenging for teams to ensure they were pulling in the same direction and see how their roles fit into the bigger picture. 

A "Lightbulb Moment" with Count

Like teams, metrics never sit in isolation. But it hasn’t always been easy to show the relationships between them or present them within the context that makes them matter.

Runa’s data team began to design metric trees freehand and build acceptance, understanding and excitement across the organization before writing a single line of SQL. Not being bound by BI let them move quickly and get to a hypothetical outcome that genuinely solved the challenge, not just showed the data. Count was then the obvious choice to implement these designs.

Rather than just recreating their existing BI deployment like-for-like, the team used the migration as an opportunity to streamline and improve their existing data models. Along the way, they realized they didn't need much of their old system and dramatically simplified and reduced the amount of data they were pushing out into the organization.

During this process they worked closely with Count as one of the first testers for Count Metrics. This collaborative partnership and their real-world feedback ensured the tool effectively addressed Runa's needs.

A culture where data counts

Count's intuitive interface has allowed the data team to spend less time optimizing, QAing, and constantly tweaking dbt models. With greater visibility into underperforming areas, the team could prioritize their time and energy on meaningful improvements — building tools and features that customers actually wanted and needed.

The visual connection of metrics in metric trees generated excitement among executives, fostering a data-driven culture at the leadership level, and strengthening it all the way down to individual teams. 

“There's no more powerful way of being able to do that than to actually show logically how all the metrics map together and how each person's domain contributes to the growth of the business. And that's something that we're making meaningful steps towards now, which we struggled with in the past”.