When the client engaged us, their planning cycle was 90 days. The data was 13 days old by the time it reached the people who could act on it. They believed they had a data infrastructure problem.
They didn't. They had an organizational delivery problem dressed up as one.
What we found in the first week
The warehouse was modern and well-governed. Pipelines ran nightly. Dashboards existed and were actively used. The bottleneck wasn't availability of data — it was the handoff between three teams that each owned a slice of the path from raw event to executive action.
Every team was doing its job correctly. Together, they were producing 13-day-old intelligence in a market that moved hourly.
What we changed
Three things, in order:
- Removed the handoff. Created a single squad that owned the path end-to-end: ingest, transform, surface, act. Same people, same standup.
- Streamed what mattered. Not everything needed to be real-time — but the six metrics the executives actually used to make decisions did.
- Built a decision interface. Replaced the dashboard with an interface designed around the actions executives wanted to take, not the data engineers wanted to display.
The outcome
Eleven weeks from kickoff, decision latency dropped from 13 days to under 4 hours. The dashboards were retired. The squad model became the template for two adjacent business units.
The infrastructure budget didn't change.