As a data leader, your first 90 days define how your organization will trust - or question - its data. This playbook helps you turn chaos into clarity: from setting meaningful goals, to AI-powered governance, to building lasting trust in every metric-driven decision.
Phase 1: Goals Before Dashboards
Key Actions
- ✓Sit with every functional leader-Product, Growth, Finance, Ops.
- ✓Ask: "What are the top 2-3 decisions your team makes weekly?" (e.g., scale spend, ship feature, tighten underwriting).
- ✓Turn those into goal statements with clear thresholds.
Even if your metrics are evolving, you'll know which numbers must be reliable first. Trust doesn't start with tools-it starts with shared definitions of success.
Pro tip:
Use Connecty's DayZero Semantic Layer
to pre-populate a comprehensive list of your personalized business goals by each function.
Phase 2: AI-Powered Governance
Key Actions
- ✓Collect all existing definitions: wikis, dbt models, SQL snippets, slide decks, data catalogs.
- ✓Mark conflicts and inconsistencies ("Revenue" includes refunds in one place but not another; "Active User" uses different windows).
- ✓Run alignment workshops with stakeholders and resolve the "big five": Revenue, Active User, CAC, Churn, LTV.
Pro tip:
Tools like Connecty’s DayZero Semantic Layer
can auto-learn base semantics from query history + metadata to make alignment in minutes than weeks.
Phase 3: Metric Drift as a feature, not a Bug
Key Actions
- ✓Definitions evolve. Version changes are bound to happen - handle them systematically.
- ✓Create a workflow for definition evolution, auto-versioning, and safe downstream rollout.
- ✓To avoid pushing business teams to create hidden “Google Sheet layers” of their own siloed truth, ensure fast, derived metrics or last-mile transformations.
Pro tip:
Use Connecty’s Autonomous Semantic Graph
for AI powered auto-updated definitions in a trusted living semantic graph, and detect or approve any dependencies downstream.
Journey Recap
| Phase | Key Outcome |
|---|---|
| Day 1-30 | Clarity on business decisions & thresholds |
| Day 31-60 | Single Source of Truth through aligned semantics |
| Day 61-90 | Sustainable trust via versioned, transparent changes |
By Day 90, you’re NOT judged on architecture. You’re judged on TRUSTED decisions.
