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Here are 7 lessons I took from our webinar with Intruder this week. How to turn OKRs into a driver of growth instead of another quarterly admin task... Background: Most OKRs look fine on paper. Projects delivered. KRs marked green. But the business doesn’t actually move. That’s exactly where Intruder found themselves. Teams busy, but top-level metrics stayed flat. OKRs had become a reporting exercise, not a growth engine. That’s the pain point we tackled in our webinar with Andy, Aadam, and David from the Intruder team. And the story offers a playbook worth sharing. Here’s the breakdown 👇 1️⃣ Activity ≠ impact Intruder realised they were celebrating outputs, not outcomes. Shipping features or running campaigns meant nothing if revenue, churn, or other key company growth levers didn’t change. You can spot this pattern a mile off: “team metrics green, business objectives red.” OKRs only work when KRs map cleanly to the real levers of growth. 2️⃣ Tool sprawl kills clarity OKRs sat in one tool, metrics in BI dashboards. Manual updates, stale data, leadership meetings spent reconciling “whose numbers are right.” This is classic metric drift and governance friction. Until you collapse OKRs and metrics into the same source of truth, alignment will always be fragile. 3️⃣ Build OKRs into your warehouse workflow Intruder rewired their OKRs into Count canvases, pulling directly from the warehouse. That flipped the process: No more "reporting" on OKRsThe OKRs themselves are now data products Live, versioned, and queryable. 4️⃣ Stabilise objectives, review rhythmically They moved from quarterly resets (chaos) to four annual objectives, reviewed biweekly. This balance gives stability without going stale. Definitions stay consistent, reviews surface variance. 5️⃣ Let the OKR canvas drive leadership meetings Every leadership session starts at the North Star and works down through objectives and KRs. Each exec “owns” their slice and adds commentary. No more opinions vs. data. The canvas is the single agenda. 6️⃣ Extend with team-specific reporting Department canvases branch off the top-level OKRs. Marketing’s canvas traces trials → opps → revenue. Product’s canvas ladders vulnerability checks → integrations → retention. This creates lineage—you can trace any business question back to a metric owner. 7️⃣ Empower non-technical teams with a semantic layer An unlock was Count Metrics. David (marketing) was able to unify CRM + product data into a funnel view in under an hour. No SQL, no ticket queue. Analysts define metrics once, business teams explore safely. That’s how OKRs stop being a data team bottleneck and become a company-wide practice. 👉 The result: OKRs aren’t “another dashboard.” They’re a living document for alignment. Full webinar here: https://lnkd.in/epQWGkWV OKR canvas here: https://lnkd.in/ejSrWKQ2

Happening today! Learn how Intruder built a cross-functional OKR system that actually aligns teams—using real-time data, shared metrics... and one canvas in Count. 📅 Wed, Aug 27 ⏰ 3PM UK / 10AM ET 🎤 With leaders from Product, Marketing & Data 👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/d35pviec Don’t miss this one.

Tomorrow, I'm going live with Aadam, Andy, and David from Intruder to show how they turned OKRs into a system that actually drives alignment. No more green key results with red objectives. No more siloed tools or stale dashboards. They built a canvas-based OKR system in Count (connected to real-time data) that every team can see, understand, and act on. And we're going to walk you through exactly how they did it on a live webinar! Here’s what we’ll cover: 📊 How Intruder tied OKRs to live product & business data 🧩 The shared canvas system that made goals visible and actionable 🚀 How execs now make better, faster decisions with data Plus, we'll do a full Q&A and share all the canvas examples afterwards. 📅 TOMORROW — Wednesday, Aug 27 ⏰ 3PM UK / 10AM ET 👉 Grab your spot now: https://lnkd.in/eXYc99S2

What if your OKRs didn’t just track progress—but helped drive it? At Intruder, that’s no longer a “what if.” As the company scaled, its data, product, and marketing leaders faced a familiar challenge: siloed tools, fragmented metrics, and OKRs that looked good on paper but failed to align teams in practice. So they built something better. A shared, canvas-based OKR system in Count that connects real-time product and business data to clear, trackable goals that every team can see and act on. And next week, the team at Intruder will be revealing all in a live webinar hosted by our very own Oliver Hughes. 📅 Wednesday, Aug 27 ⏰ 3PM UK / 10AM ET 🎤 With leaders from Product, Marketing, and Data at Intruder They’re pulling back the curtain on how they did it—and what changed as a result. 👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/eetA4RuA

A conversation. About data. Involving people who DON'T JUST WORK IN DATA. This is why I'm so excited about our webinar with Intruder next week. Because when only the data team touches OKRs and objective tracking, they stay stuck in dashboards and disconnected from the day-to-day work of product, marketing, and leadership. Intruder changed that. They built a canvas-based OKR system in Count (designed collaboratively across teams) that connects directly to real-time product and business data. Now, everyone can see how their work contributes to growth. No more siloed tools. No more guessing. No more KRs being hit while top-level goals stay stagnant. Just shared visibility, better decisions, and real alignment. On Wednesday, Aug 27, you’ll hear directly from: 🎙️ Andy Hornegold (VP Product) 🎙️ David Koke (VP Marketing) 🎙️ Aadam Sarkar (Head of Data) They’ll walk through what they built, how they did it, and what changed across the company. 📅 3PM UK / 10AM ET 👉 Register here: https://lnkd.in/ezffXyrS This isn’t just a data webinar. It’s a systems webinar—for anyone who cares about getting teams moving in the same direction.

Dashboards don’t give better decisions. They just give prettier charts. And they've become one of the most inefficient interfaces we’ve normalised. Think about it: Dashboards tell you what is happening, but rarely why. They’re great at flagging that something’s off Revenue dipped Churn spiked Traffic slowed But they leave you stranded at the most important part of the process: deciding what to do about it. That’s why ad hoc analysis exists. People see something unusual in a dashboard, then start firing off questions. It’s not random. It’s the business trying to run the improvement cycle: Observe/identify Investigate/explore Decide/act Monitor/measure But dashboards don’t support that loop. They stop at step one. This is the real problem with BI as it’s been built. Tools keep doubling down on dashboards instead of rethinking the workflow. They focus on prettier charts, faster loading times, or AI summaries. But the fundamental paradigm hasn’t changed since Tableau 15 years ago. At Count, we never set out to build “a better dashboard.” We set out to build a better interface for the improvement cycle itself. One where visibility, exploration, discussion, and decision-making all live together. Where you’re not just staring at a chart, but actually moving through the loop from insight to action. Because businesses don’t need more dashboards. They need better decisions. And that means moving beyond a paradigm that was never designed to deliver them in the first place.

🤩 CANVAS SPOTLIGHT: Customer Journey Map Ever wished your whole team could see the full customer journey, without jumping between siloed tools? That’s exactly what our Customer Journey Map canvas is designed for. Instead of Marketing knowing just how customers find you, Sales tracking where they are in the funnel, and CX knowing who your best customers are—all that context can now live in one shared view. This canvas brings together metrics and analysis across the lifecycle, from first discovery through to long-term retention. You can layer in: -Tables of top customers -Campaign performance -Even strategy impact from nurturing efforts All giving teams a single, shared understanding of what’s working (and what isn’t). The result? Smarter, faster, more collaborative decisions about where to focus next. Find it in the "Gallery" section on the Count website. Or via the link in the comments below. #CustomerJourney #MarketingAnalytics #DataAnalytics

🚀 NEW in Count: Global Filters! Filtering in Count just got a whole lot easier. Global Filters are the next evolution of Control Cells, allowing you to filter multiple visuals at once, across a whole frame or data source, with a single selection. So no more adding the same filter to each chart manually 🎉 Whether you’re breaking down metrics by geography, product line, or any other dimension, Global Filters keep your analysis consistent and lightning-fast. Spend less time clicking and more time discovering insights. Try it today in your next canvas!

When we first started thinking seriously about what makes a truly impactful data team, we looked at it from the bottom up. Our question was: How do you make a data team more than a support function? Not just answering questions, but driving ROI. Linking their work directly to value and growth. We spoke to data teams, watched how they worked, and boiled it down to four core tenets: 1. Operational clarity 2. Problem solving 3. Minimising time to decision 4. Measuring yourself From a data team perspective, those are spot on. We've shared them widely, they've been well received, and they help the team operate effectively day-to-day. But on their own, they don’t necessarily translate into broader business impact. They’re inward-facing strengths rather than a shared framework the whole company can rally around. That's when it struck me... Those four tenets enable something bigger: The improvement cycle. Identify Explore Decide Monitor Which is basically just the scientific method in business clothing. And it’s how you turn information into value: Identify a problem or opportunity Develop potential solutions Take action Measure the impact and feed that learning back into the loop It’s the bread and butter of making your business better, whether you’re running Lean Six Sigma, a growth program, or just trying to stop churn from spiking. The core idea is universal: Find the biggest opportunities Act on them Check it worked I’m not claiming the improvement cycle is ours. But I am saying that most businesses aren’t running it very well—and that’s a huge missed opportunity. Done well, it’s the fastest route to growth And the best fuel for it? Data. It's just: Most BI tools aren’t designed to support this cycle. They help you monitor what’s happening, but not actually run the loop end-to-end. That means businesses get stuck in the “monitor” stage, staring at dashboards that say something’s wrong… but not why. At Count we’ve always been more interested in enabling this loop to run faster, more collaboratively, and with higher quality outputs. Better visibility → better questions → better ideas → better decisions. Because until your improvement cycle works well, all that expensive data infrastructure isn’t delivering value. It’s just storing potential. Live by the tenets. Enact the improvement cycle. That's how you show huge value as a data team. Get leadership heads to turn. And become much, much more than a support function.

What if your OKRs actually told you whether your company is on track to hit its goals? And every team could see it, understand it, and contribute to it? At Intruder, that’s no longer a “what if.” It's a reality. Here's what they did: • Stood up a data warehouse • Centralised their metrics • Built a canvas-based system in Count the whole team could plug into One overarching canvas to track initiatives and how they flow up to the north star of revenue (see screenshot). Plus key metric trackers per team. All making sure every single team at Intruder stays ALIGNED and pulling towards the same company goal. Want to see behind the scenes of the system Intruder built? Then make sure to join the webinar I'm running with their data, product, and marketing leaders on Aug 27. We'll cover everything: -The thinking behind it -Getting it built -The data involved -How they use it internally Plenty of info, screensharing, examples, and more. 🗓️ Wednesday, Aug 27 ⏰ 3PM UK / 10AM ET Register here: https://lnkd.in/dVQBU8SJ