What should we do differently tomorrow to grow revenue

It's the fundamental question in business. Yet after years as a Chief Data Officer, working with companies generating millions in revenue and maintaining thousands of dashboards, no one could consistently answer it.

Time and time again, I was brought in to fix this. And every Monday morning, I watched the same painful ritual unfold...

The Monday morning scramble

Meanwhile, Sarah Sarah was doing what every CFO does before a board meeting: frantically building the "master metrics" spreadsheet.

Excel - monday_metrics_final_v3_FINAL.xlsx

HomeInsertPage LayoutFormulasData

Row	A	B	C	D
1	Metric	This Week	Last Week	Change
2	Revenue	-	-	-
3	New Customers	-	-	-
4	Churn Rate	-	-	-
5	Pipeline	-	-	-
6	DAU	-	-	-
7	CAC	-	-	-
8	LTV	-	-	-
9	MRR	-	-	-
10	ARR	-	-	-
11	NPS	-	-	-
12	Support Tickets	-	-	-
13	Avg Deal Size	-	-	-

MASTER

Salesforce

Google Analytics

Stripe Dashboard

HubSpot

Mixpanel

Tab after tab, copying and pasting from different dashboards. Revenue from Tableau, pipeline from Salesforce, customer metrics from Mixpanel. Each number tells part of the story. None of them tell the whole one.

This was the reality at every Private Equity portfolio company I was brought into. We'd consolidate the data, build the modern stack, stand up the dashboards. Dozens of them. And every single time, the same thing happened. People could see what was going wrong. They just couldn't see why. Revenue is down 8%. Is that pricing? Churn? A pipeline problem that started six months ago? The dashboard shows you the symptom. It never shows you the cause.

Everyone had dashboards. Nobody had answers. Marketing tracked their metrics. Sales tracked theirs. Product, Customer Success, Finance, all operating in parallel. The real insight, the thing that actually explained what was happening, lived in the connections between them. But no tool was designed to show those connections.

Challenging the status quo

Stop building dashboards. Start building a system model.

The pattern I couldn't ignore

Private Equity has a playbook: acquire companies, merge operations, drive efficiencies. As the Chief Data Officer brought in post-acquisition, my job was to make sense of the chaos.

But after consolidating data and building dashboards at company after company, the same thing kept happening. Teams could see their own numbers. They couldn't see how those numbers connected to anything else. So they'd spend months optimising a metric that turned out to be irrelevant, or inversely correlated with the goal they actually cared about.

→CEOs building "shadow dashboards" in Excel because nothing showed cause and effect
→Leaders who could see what changed, but not what caused the change or who needed to act
→Entire departments optimising in isolation, pulling in opposite directions without knowing it

The epiphany that changed everything

The problem wasn't the data. It was that every metric existed in isolation. Revenue was divorced from marketing spend. Product usage was disconnected from churn. Customer satisfaction floated separately from renewal rates. But your business isn't a collection of disconnected numbers. It's a living system. And that system has logic that can be mapped.

What if you could see every relationship between your metrics? What if every employee could trace exactly how their work cascaded through the business? What if every connection was a testable assumption, one that gets stronger every time the data challenges it?

That's when KPI Tree was born. Not as another dashboard, but as the first product to combine data intelligence with human performance: the understanding of how your business actually works, and the system that gives every person a reason to care.

Richard Oastler

Founder & CEO

Experience That Matters

Built by a team that's been in your shoes

Our team brings deep experience from leading Data, Growth and People teams at some of the fastest growing scaleups in Europe through to IPO and beyond. We've faced the same challenges you're facing now.