The 50-Foot Bronze Elephant in the Room
Oh, look. It’s one of your company’s internal meetings.
You’re sitting in the Google Meet waiting room, cursing because you hate Google Meet and are bracing for the moment you have to ‘Share Screen’ where you spend 10 minutes looking for where Google hid the button this time.
You enter as 12 people are joining in from all across the country. 12 people. 12 different dashboards on display. Cindy just accidentally unmuted herself as she’s lapping up the now cold pasta that’s been sitting on her desk for the past two hours. 7 of your coworkers are staring blankly at their screen. The remaining four all unmute themselves as a cultish (and out-of-sync because the delay in everyone’s video feeds) chant begins to erupt from their video squares:
BI-Tep! BI-Tep! BI-Tep!
^ Yeah, same zombie look and everything.
“BI-Tep” might as well be the official patron saint of SaaS meetings. But for all the dashboards we swoon over having, almost none of them are actually helping us make smarter decisions.
Whomp. Whomp.
The Dashboard Isn’t the Destination (It’s a Mirage)
Worshipping the dashboard doesn’t mean you’re using BI.
Sure, it feels productive, and the first time you see it, it’s pretty cool.
But after that?
You pull up the dashboard, skim the metrics, nod solemnly like a surgeon reviewing vitals. You scroll through your Looker tabs like a priest flipping pages of sacred scripture. But here’s the thing: Just because you have the data doesn’t mean you’re doing anything with it.
Today’s Honest Definition of BI = a collection of data living in dashboards and reports that you either don’t know what to do with or don’t use to make decisions because [insert today’s excuse].
What BI should mean = An intentionally bred culture of not making a single decision without wielding the infinity stones of your SaaS data gauntlet, Data Thanos.
Everyone has dashboards. Fewer have good, actionable data. Even fewer have direction. B2B SaaS companies have gotten good at ingesting data and decoding specific KPIs. But most decisions being made organizationally are happening in silos because:
- Teams don’t know what to do with the data
- There is just too much data, given the appearance of being data-driven but really you’re just data-drowning
- Some combination of the two
If your dashboards aren’t helping you make faster, clearer, more confident moves, they’re just very expensive wallpaper.
Somewhere in here is the insight that was supposed to change our trajectory. Let us know if you find it.
Key Point: Most SaaS teams confuse access with action. Dashboards don’t make decisions. People do. And the BI stack you spent six figures on isn’t a strategy, it’s a mirror. It shows you stuff. It doesn’t tell you what to do with it.
What BI Should Actually Help You Do
Here’s a radical thought: BI isn’t there to impress your board. It’s there to help your team make bold, aligned, confident moves before the board ever gets involved. I know, so crazy.
Most SaaS companies are using BI like a postmortem report: “Let’s look at what happened and talk about how bad it is.”
What you should be using it for is surgical navigation. Strategic risk. Team alignment. Sharpening the point of your spear.
A Healthy BI Culture Should Help You:
- Spot what’s actually working and scale it faster
Not just “campaign performance is up,” but “product-qualified leads doubled after we changed our onboarding sequence; let’s invest there.” - Kill what’s not working with less hand-wringing
When attribution, adoption, and activation all point to one page that underperforms, you don’t need a meeting. You need to hit delete. - Align product, marketing, and sales around the same levers
If your GTM team is pointing at the same graph with three different conclusions, you don’t need more data. You need a unified BI POV. - Empower individuals to act
If only your RevOps person knows how to pull insight from Power BI, you’re not data-driven. You’re data-screwed.
Three teams. One account. Zero alignment.
Key point: BI isn’t about building prettier reports. It’s about building the kind of clarity that makes your next move obvious.
BI Isn’t a Platform. It’s a Belief System.
It’s five minutes into that internal BI call. Cindy’s muted again (bless her). The Head of Product is talking about weekly active users. Sales is asking for MQL volume. Ops is wondering why everything’s red but nobody’s panicking.
You, meanwhile, are staring at the same dashboard you looked at yesterday. The one with 42 metrics, 7 widgets, and a vibe that screams, “We are so smart and yet somehow so lost.”
And then it hits you:
We don’t have a data problem. We have a decision problem.
We don’t need more dashboards. We need a different culture.
Build a BI Culture to Get You Out of the Desert
The moment those thoughts finish, Indecision Mountain begins to shake and sink into the desert sand as a new pathway emerges.
Out there. In the distance. It’s the Promised Land your company has dreamed of but never knew how to get to.
See, you can spend $80K on the prettiest Looker build this side of Series B, but if nobody knows what the numbers mean, or worse, doesn’t feel safe acting on them, you’re not building a smarter company. You’re just adding new scenery to your shared sense of confusion.
Here’s what a real BI-driven culture looks like:
- The team shares a common definition of success
No more “Is this a good number?” debates. Everyone knows what matters and what moves it, and what overarching strategy governs it. - Insight travels, decisions follow
A drop in product usage doesn’t die in a RevOps Slack thread. It starts a war room. - Data becomes part of the conversation, not the presentation
Dashboards don’t just sit in your Chrome browser like abandoned pizza coupons in a Gmail promotions tab. They shape priorities and drive action. - People feel confident saying, “Here’s what I think we should do.”
Because they know the data backs them up, not buries them in “maybe.”
Pick Up Your New GPS and Walk Forward
We’ve wandered long enough.
The dashboards didn’t get us there. The 98-slide board decks didn’t get us there. Even Cindy’s third BI tool implementation didn’t get us there.
Why?
Because data without direction is just decoration.
But now that you’ve reimagined BI as a culture, not a tool, you’re ready to use it like a GPS:
- Not a passive readout
- Not a flex
- Not something to worship, but a guide that helps you move
Here’s What to Do Next
- Audit your current dashboards: If you have to explain what a metric means more than once, it’s not helping you. Archive it.
- Align your teams on a shared success definition: Get Product, RevOps, Marketing, and Sales in a room. No dashboards. Just, “What’s the one signal that means we’re winning?”
- Build rituals around decisions, not reporting: What are your recurring meetings actually for? If it’s just to say “Here’s what we’re seeing,” that’s not enough. Make it, “Here’s what we’re doing because of what we’re seeing.”
- Train for bravery, not just literacy: The most valuable BI culture isn’t the one where everyone understands the data. It’s the one where people feel brave enough to act on it.
Key point: You don’t need a bigger dashboard. You need a team with Guts™. And if you build the right BI culture, they’ll know where to go and have the Guts™ to get there.
