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Who owns what a number means?

5 min readUpdated

Every self-service analytics rollout eventually runs into the same question: when two teams define revenue differently, who decides? The workable answer is a named owner per business domain who approves a small set of definitions, with everything else clearly labeled as unapproved rather than blocked, so exploration continues without unapproved numbers being mistaken for official ones.

The argument is older than the tooling

Does revenue include intercompany? Is a customer counted on signature or first invoice? These questions predate every analytics tool your company has bought, and no tool settles them. What a tool can do is make the settled answer automatic and the unsettled ones visible.

A model that works

  • One accountable owner per domainFinance owns financial definitions and revenue operations owns pipeline definitions. The owner is a named person who can be asked why, rather than a committee.
  • Approve a small set, deliberatelyTen to twenty definitions cover most of what decisions rest on. Trying to approve everything means approving nothing for six months.
  • Unapproved is labeled, not blockedPeople must still be able to explore. What must not happen is an exploratory answer being presented with the same authority as an approved one.
  • Approval is a person, never automaticA tool can propose and rank candidate definitions. It should not promote one on its own, because an automatically approved metric that is subtly wrong is indistinguishable from a correct one until a quarter closes on it.

What to do about the long tail

Most questions are asked once. Insisting every one of them uses an approved definition is how a governance program becomes the new bottleneck, which is the problem it was meant to solve.

The workable rule is that anything a decision rests on needs an approved definition, and anything exploratory does not, provided the difference is visible on the answer itself. If a person cannot tell which kind they are looking at, the labeling has failed and the governance is theater.