Representative work story
Three Systems. Three Numbers. No Shared Answer.
Following the data across the stack until the team could make one decision
A representative systems story: marketing, sales, and management were each looking at a different version of the same month.
The meeting started with reconciliation
Marketing had one number. Sales had another. The management dashboard had a third.
All three came from real systems. All three could be explained. None of them helped the room decide what to do next.
Forty minutes disappeared into filters, date ranges, and whether a lead counted before or after a particular status change.
The same thing happened every month.
The stack had grown one useful tool at a time
Nothing in the setup was obviously unreasonable.
The website tracked form submissions. The ad platforms reported conversions. The CRM held contacts and opportunities. A reporting layer pulled selected data into management dashboards.
The problem lived between them.
Definitions changed at each handover. Some data moved automatically, some by spreadsheet, and some only when someone remembered. The systems were connected technically, but not logically.
Discovery followed the data
I mapped one real journey from the first touch to the sales outcome.
At each step we wrote down what happened, which system owned the data, what the next system received, and where a human filled the gap. That made the invisible work visible: exports, corrections, private spreadsheets, and small workarounds the team had stopped noticing.
Then we agreed the definitions that mattered. What counts as a lead? When does sales own it? Which system is the source of truth for revenue? What does each dashboard need to help someone decide?
Only then did it make sense to change the integrations.
Build around the decision
Some connections needed rebuilding. Some manual steps were fine once ownership was clear. Some dashboards disappeared because they answered questions nobody was asking.
The goal was not a perfectly automated stack. It was a system the team could understand and operate.
Documentation sat beside the work: definitions, owners, data flow, and what to check when a number looked wrong. That meant the next change did not require starting the investigation again.
What changed
The monthly meeting stopped being a number fight.
People knew where each metric came from, why it mattered, and who owned it. Reporting became useful because the decisions behind the data were finally shared.
If your systems are all telling the truth differently, send me the flow.
Parts of the work