Metric Alignment for AcmeFlow: Building Trust in Data at Series A
Client:
AcmeFlow, a B2B SaaS platform for workflow automation
70 employees | Series A funding | $10M ARR
1. The Situation
AcmeFlow’s leadership realized they were facing a growing problem:
Core business metrics like Monthly Active Users (MAU), Retention, and CAC were being calculated differently across Product, Marketing, and Revenue teams.
Symptoms included:
- Discrepancies between team dashboards and board reports
- Manual reconciliation of KPIs before investor updates
- Low confidence among leadership in key business numbers
- Slower, more painful strategic planning cycles
As the company prepared for Series B fundraising, cleaning up metric definitions became an urgent strategic need.
2. The Challenges
- Multiple Source Systems: Data scattered across Snowflake, Hubspot, Salesforce, Stripe, Amplitude.
- Different Calculation Logics: Teams had customized their own formulas over time without documentation.
- No Ownership Model: No single person was responsible for metric governance or consistency.
- High Growth Pressure: The company couldn’t afford a six-month metrics overhaul — they needed clarity within weeks.
3. The Engagement Scope
The project was framed around delivering four critical outcomes:
- A full KPI Inventory across departments
- A Conflict Summary highlighting where definitions and calculations diverged
- A proposed Ownership Map assigning responsibility for metric integrity
- A clean, actionable KPI Catalog ready for rollout across dashboards and reporting systems
4. The Process
Week 1: Audit & Conflict Mapping
- Ran structured interviews with 9 stakeholders (across Product, Marketing, Revenue, and Ops).
- Audited top 20 metrics used in strategic reports and OKRs.
- Identified 11 critical KPIs with definition drift or unclear source-of-truth systems.
- Mapped out differences in data lineage and transformation logic.
Week 2: Alignment & Delivery
- Facilitated two alignment workshops to co-create clean, agreed-upon definitions.
- Proposed an Ownership Model assigning one person per KPI responsible for definition, changes, and validation.
- Created a centralized KPI Catalog in Notion linked directly to source systems.
- Recommended future governance practices, including a lightweight Metrics Council check-in once per quarter.
5. Deliverables
- Full KPI Inventory: 20+ metrics categorized by business domain
- Conflict Summary: Document listing discrepancies across teams
- Ownership Map: Clear assignment of metric stewardship
- Clean KPI Catalog: Ready-to-use Notion template with:
- Standardized names
- Clear formulas
- Data sources
- Update frequencies
- Metric owners
- Recommendations Report: Strategic advice for scaling KPI governance over time
6. The Results
- 30% reduction in dashboard maintenance time for internal reporting
- Zero conflicts in KPI definitions during next board meeting
- Increased confidence among C-suite leaders for strategic decision-making
- Faster onboarding of two new data analysts, using the new KPI Catalog as a training baseline
The Metric Consistency Review project created immediate operational wins and helped AcmeFlow avoid costly rebuilds of its reporting infrastructure later.