Brendan Dell

Product positioning + high-impact messaging for category leading technology companies. Also wrote a book, built the course the $1B Pitch, host the podcast $1B tech, and do some angel and early stage investing.

President 

GTMfund

GTMramp Member

Zeconomy, Inc.

Positioning + messaging, investment narrative, GTM

Messaging + GTM Advisory

Sudozi

The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging

Stories define our reality. The stories you tell--as an individual, a business, an organization--will shape yours. 

LEARN TO MOVE MARKETS

In this book, you'll find the laws that govern the creation of high-impact messaging.

Craft high-impact messages and you can shape culture, drive sales, incite movements--mold the world around you.

Fail, and craft bland apathetic messages, and you'll find yourself yet another voice, lost in the crowd.

While there is no singular template for crafting a high-impact message, there are laws that govern what works. This book is your guide.

Author

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Messaging and GTM advisory for print and global healthcare.

Strategic Advisor

App Annie

Messaging Consultant

Expedia Group

Positioning and product messaging, GTM strategy, content strategy

UserTesting

Panasonic

Product naming and positioning, messaging, GTM for eco solutions

I spent the last 10 years building my messaging and positioning consultancy from 0 to 7-figures, working with some of the largest brands in the world. Companies like HP, Panasonic, Expedia, Y-Combinator Portfolio companies and 100+ more.

Then, last year, I quietly blew the whole thing up.

I had spent my career helping big tech sell more stuff that no one needed. It worked. 

I generated $300M+ in revenue and raised over $80M in venture capital.

The only problem? I felt empty. I wanted a new path. 

One day, walking with a friend, he asked me how I built my business. I was walking him through my philosophies, frameworks, and approaches. Something I had done many times over the years, coaching folks on the side, with great success.

When he said, "Dude, this is killer. Why don't you help people do this?" 

ENTER THE FREELANCE FORMULA
A decade of 7-figure freelancing distilled into a simple framework that can help anyone transform their skills into a 6 or 7 figure business.

MY POINT OF VIEW
All over the world, people are over worked and underpaid. They have wonderful skills, but there’s a problem: They don’t know how to sell them effectively on the open market. 

So I developed The Freelance Formula. Inside we give you a roadmap to start, differentiate, and “scale” a highly profitable 1-person business. 

Start-up
Specialization
Differentiation
Customer acquisition
Scale
Systemization
Beyond

Today the community is 1,000+ strong, with folks from 50+ countries and top companies like Coinbase, Warner Brothers, HP, and Y-Combinator, growing every day. 

MY MISSION
Everyone on the planet should know how to monetize their expertise. It diversifies your income, serves as the gateway to entrepreneurship, and creates a freedom of income, impact, and lifestyle. 

THE NEXT STEP
To join the Strategic Freelance revolution, join my newsletter at brendandell.com.

Some people will call this woo-woo.

But before I went from $75/hour to $75K projects, I had to learn something uncomfortable:

I wasn’t underpaid because I lacked skill.
I was underpaid because I was selling the wrong identity.

For years I called myself a “copywriter.”
My clients called me a copywriter.
And so I got copywriter rates.

But then I saw an agency charging $85K for a project I was completing in it's entirety... for about $2,500. 

The work I was actually doing?

– Positioning
– Offer design
– Narrative strategy
– Conversion architecture

The problem wasn’t my skills.
It was the container those skills lived inside.

The turning point?

Seeing a proposal from an agency I subcontracted for:
$85,000 for “messaging and positioning strategy.”

I was doing the work.
For $75/hour.

That document changed everything.

I stopped selling “copy.”
I started selling strategic outcomes.

Same person.
Same skills.
New container → new income.

The lesson:
If you want to change your earning power, don’t start with skill acquisition.

Start by upgrading your identity and the value container you sell it through.

Everything else flows from that.

Helped 1,547+ experts clarify their message and scale | Ex-HP, SAP, Expedia, YC Startups, 100+ More

Years ago I was a copywriter making $75/hour.

Then everything changed—but unfortunately not all at once.

Over a period of 12–24 months, something became painfully obvious:

How you package your skills matters more than what you actually do.

It started when I read Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss.
Then I watched guys like Andy Raskin run workshops while I was grinding out copy until midnight.

But the real turning point was this:

I saw a proposal from an agency I was subcontracting for.
They had billed $85,000 for messaging and positioning strategy.

I was doing the work.

For $75/hour.

That one document flipped a switch.
I wasn’t underpaid because I lacked skill—
I was underpaid because I was selling the wrong unit of value.

So over the next year, I transitioned from “copywriter” to “messaging strategist.”
From selling hours…
to selling outcomes.

And eventually I went from $75/hour to $75K engagements.

(Not every engagement was $75K. But LinkedIn does love a tidy transformation, doesn’t it.)

The lesson:

If you want to change your income, don’t start with your skillset.
Start with the value container you sell it through.

Everything else flows from that.

Prove me wrong:
The perfect work week is 30 hours.

Not 40.
Not 50.
And definitely not the 9–9–6 culture people brag about.

Here’s the truth nobody wants to hear:

You can’t do more than 30 hours of real cognitive work without borrowing energy from the future.

After that, you’re just majoring in minor things — staying busy to avoid the discomfort of focus.

I’ve coached hundreds of professionals, and the pattern is absurdly consistent:

The best ideas come in the first 4 hours of the day.
Decision quality collapses after 6.
Output after hour 30 is mostly noise.

People don’t burn out because they work too hard.
They burn out because they waste their best hours on low-leverage tasks, meetings, and reactive garbage.

If you’re doing high-leverage work — thinking, writing, designing, solving —
30 hours is the upper limit before the quality drops and the cost skyrockets.

More hours don’t create more value.
They just produce worse decisions, slower cycles, and a tired mind pretending to be productive.

Prove me wrong.
What’s your ideal work week?

Call it woo-woo if you want, but here’s what I’ve learned:

Your career isn’t limited by your talent.
It’s limited by who you think you are.

People treat you according to the identity you project.

A hard lesson I learned on the way to $75K engagements:

The market will underpay you as long as you let it define your work.

I used to introduce myself as a “copywriter.”
Clients loved that.
It kept me cheap, replaceable, safe.

But the work I was ACTUALLY doing?

Positioning
Offer architecture
Strategic messaging
Founder narrative
Demand psychology

I was doing $85,000 work for $2,500 fees…
because I was packaging myself like a commodity.

The moment I changed the name of my work,
the market changed the value of it.

Not because I learned something new.

But because I finally described myself accurately.

If you feel underpaid, start here:
Does the name of your work reflect the value of your work?

95% of the time, the answer is no.

Most people aren’t underpaid because they lack skill.

They’re underpaid because they’re wearing the wrong label.

For years, I walked around with the label “copywriter” on my forehead.

Clients saw that label.
I saw that label.
And so my earnings were capped by it.

But behind the scenes, the work I was doing looked nothing like “copywriting”:

– Diagnosing positioning problems
– Designing offers
– Uncovering customer psychology
– Architecting conversion paths

Then one day I saw it in print:

A proposal from an agency I subcontracted for.
$85,000 for “strategic messaging.”
The project I was doing almost entirely myself… for ~$3,000.

That was the moment the label cracked.

I realized this:

People pay you based on how they perceive your work.
Not the complexity of what you actually do.

So I dropped the “copywriter” label.
And I started labeling what I did accurately:

Strategy.
Clarity.
Value creation.

Same brain.
Same output.
Different label → different leverage → different income.

If you’re mid-career and feel underpaid, start here:

What label are you wearing?

And what label actually reflects the transformation you deliver?

Your income rises the moment those two finally match.

If you work with clients, it's worth remembering

- Do not take things personally
- Do not take things personally
- Do not take things personally 

Easy to say, hard to do

Years ago I thought the game was simple:

Be good → get paid.

Then I hit a wall that every mid-career pro eventually hits:

Being good is not enough.

I had clients telling me they “loved my work”…
while simultaneously nickel-and-diming every invoice.

I felt stuck and couldn't see a way out.

Then I met a consultant who made more in one engagement
than I made in an entire quarter.

She wasn’t smarter.
She wasn’t more talented.
She wasn’t working harder.

She simply framed her value differently.

She didn’t sell projects.
She sold process. 
She sold transformations.

That day, everything clicked:

Your income is a function of how you package, frame, and articulate your value — not your raw skill.

Once I rebuilt the container, my career changed.
Not immediately.
But permanently.

Most people stay underpaid not because they lack expertise —
but because they’re selling it in the wrong format.

This is why I say: Change your story -> change your price -> change your life

Here's a lesson I hard to learn the hard way:
Most people want to believe they’re underpaid because companies are greedy.

It’s a comforting story.
It removes responsibility.
It puts the blame on institutions instead of identity.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The game is the game — and the system isn’t designed to reward the value you feel you provide.
It rewards the value you signal and position yourself to provide.

Two people with the same skill level can earn 10x different incomes.

Why?

Not because one is smarter.
Not because one works harder.
Not because one is “more deserving.”

But because:

One sits higher in the value chain.
One controls the framing of the problem.
One sells outcomes.
The other sells labor.

If you sell yourself as a worker, the system prices you like a worker.
If you position yourself as someone who changes business outcomes, the system prices you like someone who changes outcomes.

It’s not fair.
It’s not moral.
But it is real.

And here’s the part most people never hear:

Your income doesn’t rise when companies become nicer.
Your income rises when your positioning becomes sharper.

Better positioning =
• clearer value
• higher leverage
• fewer competitors
• stronger identity
• higher place in the chain of decisions

If you’re underpaid, it’s rarely a skill problem.
It’s almost always a positioning problem.

The minute you change how you’re perceived,
you change what the market believes you’re worth.

The game is the game.
You don’t beat it by fighting it.
You beat it by positioning yourself where the value actually is.

Starting in 2021, I earned over $500K working with just 6–9 clients.

Some people will call this woo-woo.
But the shift had nothing to do with tactics.

It wasn’t my sales process.
It wasn’t my funnel.
It wasn’t some “viral” piece of content.

It was one uncomfortable realization:

Most freelancers are drowning because 80% of their clients
actively prevent them from ever leveling up.

I was one of them.

Always busy.
Always stressed.
Always undercharging.
Always “trying to fit in one more project.”

Then I ran a simple income audit:

90% of my revenue came from 6–9 clients.
The rest were noise disguised as opportunity.

So I made a decision that felt terrifying at the time:

I cut the bottom tier.
I doubled down on the top tier.
And I re-positioned myself around outcomes, not deliverables.

Within a year:

– My income jumped
– My stress collapsed
– My calendar opened
– My value became obvious
– My leverage multiplied

No new skills.
No new tactics.
Just a different container.

The lesson:
You don’t get paid for being busy.
You get paid for being positioned.

If you want to earn like a top 1% freelancer,
you must first stop thinking like a bottom 80% one.

Heading into Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of one simple truth:

Time off only feels like time off when you’re not scared to take it.

Most people I know are getting ready for a long weekend…
but they’re still checking email, on call, want to make sure their boss knows their "here for the team." 

Many carrying the weight of a job that asks them to do more, with less, each passing year.

The challenge becomes this:

Time off doesn’t feel restful when your income depends on activity as a proxy for value. 

A few years ago, I was in that exact spot.
High income, zero control.
Every holiday just felt like anxiety. Did I really deserve to take time for myself? 

The only difference in my life now is leverage.
I've transformed my unique skills into something that can benefit many, and where I'm lucky that demand outstrips my ability to supply. 

I’m not saying this to flex.
I’m saying it because I wish someone had told me sooner:

If your time off doesn’t feel like time off…
that’s the signal to start building something for yourself.

Your time off shouldn't be pancaked by anxiety that you just brush off as "this is just the cost of getting away."

You deserve a life you don't feel like you need a vacation from.

Lauren
$90/hour → $25,000 project
when she stopped being a “copywriter”…
and became the architect of Cornerstone Content — using proprietary product telemetry to surface a company’s unique capabilities and build authority competitors can’t copy.

Jeremy
$50/hour → $15,000 engagement
when he stopped doing “marketing tasks”…
and became the creator of Executive Prickly Points of View — sharp, defensible stances grounded in market reality that reposition leaders as the only sane voice in a noisy category.

Hannah
$40/hour → $60,000 project
when she stopped managing projects…
and became the architect of a High-Velocity Delivery System — a workflow that reduces cycle time, eliminates bottlenecks, and increases output without adding headcount.

David
$60/hour → $18,000 sprint
when he stopped writing copy…
and started designing Conversion Infrastructure — the messaging, flows, and decision paths that turn unclear products into frictionless buying journeys.

Ava
$55/hour → $16,500 systems engagement
when she stopped doing manual data work…
and became the builder of an Automation Backbone — eliminating 20+ hours of repetitive tasks each week across sales, finance, and ops.

Melissa
$75/hour → $20,000 positioning project
when she stopped selling deliverables…
and began delivering Market Translation Models — frameworks that turn a founder’s intuition into simple, investable narratives teams can actually execute.

Most people don’t need a new skillset.
They need a new definition of the work they already do.

There’s something I don’t talk about much.

When I was transitioning from $75/hour copywriting to strategy work…
I didn’t feel confident.

At all.

Clients were paying me for the deliverables.
Not for my thinking.
Not for my judgment.
Not for the invisible expertise that actually drives outcomes.

And I remember the exact feeling the first time I pitched a $20K+ strategic engagement:

My hands were sweating.
I didn’t feel “qualified.”
I kept wanting to explain myself.
I almost discounted the proposal before I even sent it.

But here’s the part that surprised me:

The client said yes.

Easily.

Not because my pitch was perfect.
Not because I had a massive brand.
But because I had already been doing strategic work for years—just quietly, and for free.

That moment changed how I saw myself.

I didn’t “become” a strategist.
I realized I already was one.

Most people don’t need new skills.
They need new self-permission.

The biggest raise I ever got didn’t come from a client.

It came from a decision.

After years of doing great work, I finally admitted the truth:

I was positioning myself like a commodity.

Too wide
Too flexible
Too willing
Too accommodating
Too afraid to draw the line

One day I looked at my calendar and had the harsh realization:

I had built a business where I was the bottleneck,
the operator,
the admin,
and the product.

That’s not a business.
That’s a job with extra steps.

So I rebuilt everything from scratch:

Narrowed the offer
Raised my price
Stopped chasing “any” client
Focused on outcomes, not tasks
Built systems instead of reactions

Within a year, the income jump was dramatic.

But the psychological jump was bigger:

For the first time, I wasn’t begging the market for permission.
I was directing the market with clarity.

The raise didn’t come from a client.

It came from finally respecting my own value.

Hermès charges $25,000 for a Birkin bag.

A 5-cent grocery bag will hold the same stuff.

The difference isn’t function.
It’s the story.

That same psychology drives almost everything we do—
the cars we buy,
the clothes we wear,
even the values we cling to.

We all know this.
But we forget it applies to our careers, too.

Two people can have the exact same skills…
and earn completely different incomes…
simply because they tell a different story about who they are and the value they create.

When I finally understood this, everything changed.
I stopped selling tasks and started telling a story that reflected the real outcome of my work.
That shift took me from $75/hour to $75,000 per engagement.

Here’s the truth most people never hear:

It’s not what you do.
It’s the story you tell about what you do.

The right story doesn’t inflate your value — it reveals the value that was there all along.

For the first decade of my career, I sold what everyone else sells:

Time.

Because that’s what we’re taught.

Hours → dollars.
Effort → income.

But time is the worst product in the world:

It doesn’t scale
It punishes expertise
It rewards inefficiency
And the better you get, the less you earn

One day a client said something that slapped me in the face:

“Brendan, I don’t care how long it takes.
I just want the outcome.”

In that instant I realized:

I was selling the least valuable part of my work.

The seconds — not the skill.
The effort — not the effect.
The time — not the transformation.

I stopped selling hours and started selling outcomes.

That’s when everything changed:

Better clients
Bigger contracts
Fewer revisions
Clearer boundaries
More respect
More leverage

When you stop selling your time,
you stop being a replaceable operator
and start becoming a strategic asset.

If your income is stuck, don’t work harder.

Rebuild the container you sell your value through.

Here’s the real reason most talented people stay stuck financially:

They’re too humble for their own good.

They downplay their work.
They use modest titles.
They sell tasks instead of transformations.
They avoid claiming what they actually own.

I did this too.

I called myself a “copywriter” while I was architecting multimillion-dollar brand narratives.

The agency that hired me?
They sold my work for $85,000.

I was paid $75/hour.

Was that unfair?
Sure.
But the bigger truth is this:

The market can only value what you name out loud.

The moment I upgraded my identity, my income followed.

Talent doesn’t get you paid.
Accurate self-definition does.

Every time Elon says he works 120 hours per week, I see the same reaction:

“He’s built different.”
“Maybe that’s what it takes.”
“I guess I’ll never be successful.”

But here’s the truth almost no one says out loud:

Elon doesn’t win because he works 120 hours.
He wins because his hours have leverage that most people never build.

Let me explain.

Most people mix up effort with impact.
They think more hours → more success.

But in an unleveraged career, more hours just means:

More burnout
More stress
More dependency
More chaos
More sacrifice

Meanwhile, a leveraged person can outperform a 120-hour week…
in 20–30 hours.

Because leveraged hours do this:

A single decision shifts a company
A single asset creates recurring value
A single distribution channel multiplies reach
A single insight saves millions
A single system frees time indefinitely

Elon isn’t winning because of hours.
He’s winning because of leverage.

And here’s the twist:

You don’t need to be Elon to build leverage.
You just need to stop playing the hours game.

Most mid-career professionals are stuck not because they’re lazy —
but because they’re trapped in roles where:

Output = effort
Compensation = time
Value = tasks
Identity = worker, not creator

The future doesn’t belong to the people who grind the longest.

It belongs to the people who build systems, assets, and intellectual leverage.

Here’s the real lesson:

It’s not about working more.
It’s about working in a way where your effort compounds.

Time Wealth > Time Sacrifice.

And once you feel the difference, you can’t go back.

The difference between a $2,500 invoice and an $85,000 invoice is rarely skill. 

It's the container. 

For years, I sold my time for $75/hour. I was broke and burned out. Then I saw an agency sell my exact work for 30x what they paid me.

I realized I was using "discount words" to sell "premium outcomes."

I audited my vocabulary. Here is the shift that changed my life:

The "Commodity" Containe
- Copywriting
- Edits
- Drafts
- Hourly Rate

The "Value" Container 
- Positioning Strategy
- Offer Design
- Conversion Architecture
- Project Scope

Same human. Same brain. Same output.

But the second list signals an investment. The first list signals an expense.

If you want to charge more, stop describing the labor you do.

Start describing the outcome you create.

Most career problems aren’t skill problems. 

They’re value-perception problems.

aztela

We bridge the gap between Business and Data to transform your data into actionable insights.  Here are some results how we helped companies decrease churn, increase profits just by using their data  ↓

Founder & CEO

Savvy Social

Alignment of GTM departments for a +20% uplift in profitability, and decrease in cost due to data-driven initiatives. EMEA hit the highest month in terms of MRR. We hit over +278K in MRR in Summer which should be the toughest period. 

Projects 

- Building Revenue Operations in the Sales team for regional teams in EMEA, North America, and Asia
- Accurate reporting  across every touchpoint through the funnel
-  Automate & Operationalize  lead lifecycle for frictionless processes
-  Dashboard for sales, executives, and the marketing team
-  Automation, workflows, and operation for sales teams and fulfillment sites across the organization
- Sales projection, forecasting, and data analytics** for EMEA, NA, and Asia regions
- Aligning departments (marketing, sales, and CS)
- Implementing CRMs and integrating with other GTM tech tool

Head of Analytics

HYPCCCYCL

Member
HYPCCCYCL is an invite-only, professional community where top B2B revenue leaders cross-train their GTM skills with VCs.

Brand Ambassador

RevGenius

Member

Astela

< Open the vault >
< put quality in your pipeline >
< Revenue engine that lasts forever NewEra of GTM >

We are like your Outsourced CRO aka Revenue engine. 

•Market penetration
•GoToMarket strategy 
•Fastest way to Impact 
•Fixing the old way of doing outbound with  TheVault (Outbound2.0.0) which is customer centric overall aligning bot revenue engines sales and marketing. 

We created that demand so outbound feels like inbound. 

Revenue focused > Meetings.

Co-Founder

Spendesk

Account Executive

- Started seeing results after 2-3 months.
- Been for few months as full cycle rep. 
- 980k ARR sourced
- Shift happened after seeing that volume was not gone help 
- Started to pursue quality in targeting and picking accounts, personas & ICP. 
- As it was early, the company also went in marketing to understand things that could help me. 
- Been involved a lot with the marketing and CS team all the time. Also working closely with the manager.

Senior Sales Representative

Etiket Agency

- Establishing their and runing their paid advertisement performance campaigns for B2B clients.
- Managing their campaign budgets for B2B clients. 
- Running SEO and FB campaigns mostly. 
- Running marketing team full of 14 people at the end started only with 2.

Marketing Manager

- Researching for clients campaigns. 
- Managing CRM. 
- Working closely with marketing and sales and CEO. 
- Admin work.

Sales And Marketing Specialist

Head of RevOps | Recently helped SaaS organisation 19% faster growth, +10-20% sales productivity, and 30% lower GTM costs with Revenue Operations

My Name is Ali and I love building things. Whether that be data solutions, my business, or helping other organizations at the end what I'm doing is building myself into the person I want to become. 

Our thesis is that data is the lifeblood of any organization and will only work if it's made custom to your goals, needs and priorities at any stage of your growth.

Unfortunately, many businesses don't have that as they 

-  Rely on off-the-shelf solutions that are not custom to their needs and don't adapt 

- Their data is all over the place resulting in not able to make any data driven decisions.

- Can't rely on their data to make rational logical decisions. 

- They track surface-level KPIs and not actionable insights that would give them a competitive advantage 

- They don't know how to bridge the gap between business and data expertise.

Well at aztela we are that bridge that connects business and data together to develop a moat inside of your business resulting in: 

- One of our clients generated over 20x ROI since starting working with us resulting in over $10m in revenue attributed 

- Increasing profits due to seeing everything at one place which would normally take you 100h a month

- Decreased churn and increased LTV able to see bottlenecks, and root cause as opposed then spinning in circles 

- Fixing inefficient operations due to removing data silos 

We do that by utilizing data you already have and turning it into actionable insights. 

We implement custom analytics dashboards (BI) and advanced solutions to achieve business results just by utilizing data you already have.  

If you want to create a moat, competitive edege in your market click on this link to speak to our team- > 
https://calendly.com/alizu/15-minute-meeting-aztela?month=2024-04I

Ali Z

Everyone trying to 'become AI-driven.' But less than 10% of you actually are. You can't even trace where your data is coming from or what is difference between 2 metrics. 

Let’s call it what it is:
Most AI or ML initaitives fail because your data isn’t ready.

When we walk into mid-market organizations we see the same pattern every time:

Sales, finance, and ops each define metrics differently.
BI and AI pull from different data sources.
Data pipelines are built in silos, no lineage, no ownership.
80% of the data is still trapped in PDFs, or spreadsheets.
AI pilots stall in POCs 

Few months ago one firm came to use after burning through $400,000 on “AI enablement.” 

When they tried to build AI use cases (recommendation engines), the models failed.

Their models couldn’t differentiate between 'accounting-adjusted revenue' and 'store-reported sales'. There was no business meaning attached. 

Here’s the Data That Should Scare Every CIO

Over 55% of companies cite inconsistent data architecture as the #1 blocker to AI readiness. But only 14% invest in Data Strategy, the part that makes all investment pay off. 

Here is how to do it 

1. Impact over complexity  

Start with use cases, data products, not ML or AI. 
Don't due AI for sake of it. Don't skip foundational work.
Most use cases I saw are hidden logical statments.

Data products deliver business outcomes. 
Then design data products, curated, governed datasets aligned to those outcomes.

The smartest organizations aren’t moving data,  they’re federating it.

They build logical data products that query where data already lives, wrapped in a semantic consumption layer that abstracts complexity from the business. 

2. Semantic & Consumption layer 

A semantic layer starts by translating business concepts into reusable logic.

Instead of 20 “revenue” tables with different definitions, you get one trusted “Revenue” concept everyone agrees on defined once, reused everywhere. 

3. Add Business Context, Metadata & Lineage

Don't just add metadata. Add meaning. 
If not, AI will just assume. 

Column names like rev_net_v3_final don’t help at all. 
You need business metadata, written in the language your teams use.

You need business metadata, written in the language your teams use. 

Answer: What does each data point mean in business terms?  Where from? Where used etc?

This is not only for AI but also for trust and adoption. 

4. Don't need 99% data quality but 

The companies that are winning treat AI readiness like data hygiene.

Data doesn’t stay clean.
Set process ensuring data accurate in upstream. 
Freshness checks ensure data timeliness. 

5. Simplify to Scale.

Complexity kills agility.
If your data architecture diagram looks like a Gartner Expo, it’s already broken.
Every component should have a measurable purpose or be removed.

Start fixing the foundation that actually makes it work.
AI Readiness is a byproduct of good data enviroment.

Ali Šifrar

CEO @ aztela | Fractional data leader helping scaleups+ mid-market, gain control, value from their data to accelerate their data, digital & ai journey.

You’re about to make a $200k mistake on your first data hire. Your first hire shouldn’t be technical. It should be strategic.

The CEO says: “We need to be data-driven.”
The CTO agrees: “We should hire a Data Scientist.”
 
So they do.
PhD. Brilliant. Technical wizard.
They join, ask for data… and walk straight into chaos.

Three CRMs with conflicting definitions.
Revenue numbers that don’t match Finance.
Dashboards that contradict every meeting.

Six months later, they’re spending 100% of their time cleaning up the past instead of building the future.

By month nine, they quit.
You’re back at zero - with a bigger mess and a smaller budget.

Here’s the blunt truth:
You don’t have a data problem.
You have a sequencing problem.

You started by hiring technical people before defining strategic direction.
That’s like hiring construction workers before drawing the blueprint.

Here’s what you should’ve done instead:

1. Define the Business Problem Before the Role

Most leaders start with:
“We need dashboards.”
“We need a data warehouse.”

Wrong starting point.

The right question is:

“Where are we losing money, time, or credibility because of bad data?”

That’s the anchor.
Until you can quantify that cost, every technical hire is just busywork.

2. Hire the Strategist Before the Builders

Your first hire shouldn’t be a Data Engineer or someone Specialized. 
It should be a Strategic Data Lead, or someone who can connect business goals to what the data team actually builds.

Their job isn’t to code.
It’s to define the map before you start driving.

In the first 90 days, they should:
Interview execs and department heads.
Quantify which data problems cost the most money.
Align on definitions. 
Prioritzie clear next steps 
Build a 90-day roadmap tied to ROI.

That roadmap will tell you who to hire next, and who not to.

3. Align Hires to ROI, Not Titles

If your biggest gap is broken pipelines → hire an Engineer.
If the problem is metric chaos → hire an Analyst or BI Developer.
If it’s governance → get an Architect.

But only after the roadmap exists.

Hiring a Data Scientist without strategyis like deploying AI on top of bad Excel sheets,  expensive, slow, and guaranteed to fail.

4. Measure Data Team Success in Business Outcomes

Stop celebrating activity, “We built 10 dashboards.”
Change to "Reduced fuel cost per shipment by 8%" 

5. Sit under where best 

Hot take: It doesn't matter where your data team sits. 
Seen it all work from IT, to COO to CEO. 
Put it where it brings the biggest impac

Here’s the formula I’ve seen work repeatedly:

Strategy first → Tools second → Team third.

That order alone can save you 6–12 months and hundreds of thousands in cost. 

If your first data hire is technical, you’ll get deliverables.
If your first data hire is strategic, you’ll get results.

Big difference.

-> Comment “Team” and I'll sent playbook on how to built a strategic data team in 2026 that will be your competitive edge.

You promised to build source of truth, add predictive, dashboard annoying VP but in 12 months got 313 broken dashboards. If your Head of Data says "Yes" to every request, fire them

I can walk into any $20M, $1B org and I’ll find:

-89 dashboards nobody trusts.
-A “modern stack” that costs more than it saves.
-A data team is exhausted from chasing every request.
-CEO asking, “Why we still didn't fix this data mess?”

Most fail because leaders try to fix everything at once.

“Let’s rebuild the warehouse. Add AI. Roll out dashboards. VPs screaming "We need this...." 

When everything’s a priority, nothing is.

Most act as 'ad-hoc' service desks like. 
Trying to please everyone, say YES to all usless requests. 

After 6-months you spent 80% building usless things, that don't solve the problem.

You can’t modernize your architecture, add AI all at once.

12-month 
They care about whether something finally works and gets results.
And fast. 

Here is how to balance and prioritize accordingly 

1. Create clear priortization criteria

Revisit the business pain points identified in your earlier assessment

Pick one high-visibility, high-value problem 

Define Clear Scoring Criteria

Evaluate every initiative using these dimensions:
Business Value - Quantify the ROI or risk reduction.
Complexity - How mature is your current data environment?
Urgency / Risk - What happens if we don’t solve this?
Frequency - Are these data products used recurring daily or quarterly?
Reach - How many departments or users used by?
Time-to-Value - How fast can we deliver?

Additional Factors:

Staffing & Availability 
Budget & Capital Constraints 
Competing Current Projects
Upcoming Milestone 

You can use AI to help but need to feed a lot of context

2. Map it out, Rank, Communicate, and Confirm

Now score rank each use case
Validate this with your executive sponsor:

If it doesn’t meet the criteria, it doesn’t make the cut.

High impact, low complexity → Do now
High impact, high complexity → Plan next
Low/low → Park it
Low/high → Drop it 

3. Create a “Stop Doing” list.

Think in terms of data products.
If the 'quick thing' that VP asked doesn't have an end user, outcome, timeline, current way, definition of done assigned, don't do it. 

Thats why your data strategy or priortization roadmap needs to be reflected monthly. 

At the same time, you don't need to plan 12 months, Focus on now 3-6 months MAX

Things change fast 

4. Sequence, don’t scale

Your first few wins buy trust and set foundation for future strategic initiatives.

For example 
Start with a data product where the finance team spends 50+ hours manually reconciling data. Fixing this builds your pipelines, and a semantic layer,  this create foundation for next initiatve

For example can't do 'predictive' prior having a foundation set. Start with quick wins that enable that

→Comment "Matrix," and I'll send you a Priortization Matrix Playbook on how to balance short vs long term and setup data as growth function.

Your $1M 'modern data warehouse' is world's most expensive junkyard. Tracking 2TBs of usless data 'just in case' but still takes 2-weeks to answer simple question.

Every company says the same thing:
“Let’s capture everything, for down the line”

That sentence has quietly destroyed more ROI, Snowflake credits, and data trust than any bad tool ever has.

A few years ago, I met a retail data leader that proudly told me,
“We’re tracking everything. Every click, scroll, hover, API event.”

A billion events a day.
Storage bills through the roof.
And still, the FP&A didn’t trust a single revenue number. 
Irony right

Analysts couldn’t even tell if someone added or removed an item from a cart because every event stored the entire basket state.

So the engineers were drowning in data.
The business was starving for insight.
And leadership thought the solution was… to collect even more for 'in case'.

That’s not data maturity. That’s data garbage.

Most mid-market firms believe more data = more answers.
But that logic is backwards.

When you collect everything:

Your warehouse becomes a landfill.
Pipelines grow, meaning more debugging.
Your team spends 80% of time cleaning, 20% analyzing.
Governance dies because no one knows what matters.
Every metric becomes a debate, not a decision.

“Collect everything” doesn’t make you smart, it makes you slow, expensive, and untrusted.

Here's how to fix this

1. Start with the business question, not the data source

Before tracking another event, ask: “What question are we trying to answer and who needs it?”

If it doesn’t tie to a decision, action that enables the end user to achive their objective 
Don’t collect it.

Data only valuable if used, storing it it's worth $0. 

2. Move from data hoarding to event intent.

Stop dumping entire states  
Start tracking facts, atomic events one line that captures who, what, when, and why.

They represent a business action or customer intent.

For example:
- Don't “Full basket snapshot” → 200 useless fields.
- Do “Product_Added_to_Cart” → who, what, when, how much.

That’s where clarity starts.  
This is gone build foundation for it as AI needs context, not just more data.

3. Build a tracking plan that acts like a product spec.

Define which events are allowed, what’s mandatory, and who owns them.
If it’s not in the plan, it doesn’t get into your warehouse.

Most warehouse look 'modern' outside but 'legacy' inside. 
You didn't fix nothing, just made it worse. 

4. Kill the “just in case” mindset.

You don’t need another terabyte of noise.
You need confidence in the 1% of data that drives 99% of value.

One org had TBs of data, queries that cost  > $5,000 month, that they didn't need at all. 

If it takes three department, two weeks to answer “What’s our active customer count?” 

You’re not data-driven. 

Companies winning with AI and analytics aren’t hoarding petabytes.
They’re the ones who know exactly which 1% of their data actually matters.

Data Architecture is worthless. You just spent 12 months fighting with pipelines and $500k building data platform. But then VP announced move to HubSpot, and now all your work is useless. 

Most “modern data platforms” break the moment your business changes.

You spend 12 months modernizing, Snowflake, dbt, BI, governance, the works.
You spent hours on meetings aligning on definitions. 
You finally set processes in CRM so data gets accurate in the source. 

But then suddenly…
→ The CEO changes the pricing model.
→ VP says "We migrating to Hubspot" after you spent last 5-months combating with existing sources. 

Suddenly, everything you worked on became usless 

Half your dashboards are wrong.
Data models break.
Pipelines you built are usless.
New source + process needs to be redone.

You didn’t build a data architecture right way. 

Most companies build static systems in dynamic businesses.
You’ve got cloud storage and transformation pipelines…

But every change request still takes 6 weeks.
Every definition debate lasts 5 meetings.

You are communicating throught some 3rd persona that all value gets lost through translation. 

Building 'data architerture' in itself is not valuable. 
That's step 0. 
Step 1 is actually using it and generating ROI. 

Best data leaders and teams are building adaptive data architectures and evolve with the business. Not the other way around. 


Here is how to build data architerture that ensures trust, agility and long term ROI.

1. Map business capabilities, not systems

Forget the org chart,  map what your business actually does for each business area. 
From finance, sales and so on how do they work. 

This becomes the foundation of your data platform design.

2. Architect for change, destruction, not perfection.

Keep architecture modular.

Data Integration: Connect and standardise data
Data Layer: Raw → curated → business model
Smart Data Services: Reusable data products and APIs
Search & Consume: Self-service tools and governed access 
.
You should be able to change and add without breaking or rebuilding. 

3. Build data products, not pipelines.

Each product serves multiple teams,  with clear ownership and measurable value.

E.g., “Customer Revenue Product” used by Sales + Finance + Marketing = one truth, three users. 

Everyone can accsess lowest hanging data, aligned to their objectives, which allows agility, but remains control. 

4. Make governance adaptive

Governance that moves at the pace of business,  flexible, iterative, and owned by both data and business.

Governance = light guardrails, clear ownership, fast iteration

5. Build feedback loops

Your architerture should adapt to your business. 
Attack lowest hanging fruits, only build according to value. 

Identify a business outcome
Deliver a small, testable solution
Measure impact
Iterate

When you build adaptively, everything accelerates

Your business changes every quarter.
Your data architecture should adapt, scale with you

Your machines are collecting millions of data points. But PLC says “Pump_4A” while your ERP says “Equipment_1403.” Your market edge is trapped inside 20 year old machine and 2008 Excel file. 

Pumps. Sensors. PLCs.
They’re all generating thousands of data points every second.

The problem? 
No one’s listening.

Not because the data isn’t there, it’s everywhere.
It’s because your systems, teams, machines don’t speak the same language.

Machines OT are speaking MQTT or OPC-UA.
Corporate IT systems are speaking SQL and APIs. 
The business speaks “Excel and PowerPoint.”

So you’ve got noise.

I sat with a COO & CIO of a 300-person industrial manufactuing firm.
Their “digital transformation roadmap” - AI, predictive maintenance, digital twins,

But when asked:
“Can your systems tell you in real time when a batch is about to fail?”

Silence.

Here’s what was happening behind the scenes:
-Quality results took 6+ hours to show up in reports. 
-Each factory ran different generations of equipment and software. 
-Production systems (SCADA, MES) weren’t connected to corporate IT (ERP)
- Engineers couldn’t access business data, finance couldn’t trust operational numbers. 

Because here’s the truth:

Most industrial or heavy operational orgs already own the data they need.
They just can’t use it - because it’s locked inside 20-year-old machines, local servers, and 2008 Excel templates.

The result?

Every report was hours late, every meeting a data debate, and AI pilots stayed stuck on PowerPoint. 

All while you are losing $260,000-$2M per hour due inefficency

Here is how to combine OT and IT data into a single, trusted layer to create moat

1. Start with a Unified Namespace.

Stop wiring point-to-point systems.
Standardize how data talks MQTT, OPC UA and normalize it at ingestion.

If one site logs “pump_2B_temp” and another “Pump_2B_Temperature" its problem

If every new sensor needs a custom connector, your architecture is already broken. 
All pulled from UNS from there. 

2. Unify OT and IT data in one foundation.

Make finance, operations speak the same language.

If finance’s “efficiency” and operations’ “efficiency” don’t match, losing money.

3. Govern before you automate.

Everyone wants AI. No one wants accountability.
Assign data owners, document definitions, build lineage.

Every dataset without an owner becomes a liability.
Governance isn't seperate project its part of the architecture. 

4. Democratize, but with guardrails.

Give operators, analysts, and managers access to governed data through a portal or tool they like. Excel not enemy.

It's not giving them all data, but one aligned to their needs. Federate impact, give flexibility.

5. Prioritize by value, not hype.

Start with quality prediction, maintenance alerts, where value is visible and measurable.
If a project doesn’t have a impact, defintion of done, stop.

You have data worth millions

When your OT, IT, and finance speak one language,  you can create a moat

Everyone wants AI and predictive. But most of your data is locked in 1990s ERP system, 31 spreadsheets, and Joe shouting across the hallway. Moving from legacy ERP won't make you data-driven. 

Most mid-market run on systems older than their CEOs.

That “temporary” ERP you implemented in 2010? Still there.
The homegrown Access database that powers finance? Still critical.
Half your ops? Run on Excel, emails, and shouting to Joe 

You don’t need to replace your legacy systems to move forward.
Moving from legacy ERP won't make you data-driven. 
After 18-months gone be in bigger data mess but in cloud

You just need innovate around it. 

Was talking to CIO at huge industrial company facing this nightmare.

Their ERP was from the 1990s. 
Their factories ran on siloed systems.
Data lagged 6 hours behind reality.

Replacing the ERP wasn’t an option. 
So they built around it.

They built an integration “hub” so all systems could talk without touching core ops.

They normalized data at ingestion.
They governed every metric from the start.

And suddenly, they had real-time visibility, data to leverage a 24-month delay.
They led with value, not tech. 

Here is how to deal with legacy systems

1. Stop Thinking in Systems. 

Stop treating your ERP as your source of systems
Legacy record transactions. 
Build innovation around them, not inside them.

You don’t fix legacy by buying new tools.

You fix it by decoupling the old stack from the new.
Build a central data layer (lakehouse/warehouse) that real source of truth, and let your ERP, CRM, and OT systems feed into it. 

2. Introduce an Integration & Translation UNS Layer.

If your ERP, legacy, OT systems can’t talk API, don’t panic.

Add a lightweight API gateway or event-driven architerture 
Make every legacy system publish standardized events through that. 

If ERP calls it “Material ID", Iot some code and MES calls it “Product Code” you need apply consistent data model, naming conventions

That one layer eliminates point-to-point chaos, everyone speak same language  and gets data with context. 

3. Normalize Upstream, Not in Dashboards.

Most firms want AI but have "machine_21" in warehouse but "M12" in ERP. Not gone work

Standardize naming conventions, master data, use canonical schemas , validate

If we can't align on metrics, nothing will happen

4. Go Hybrid, Not All-In Cloud

Not every system needs to move or even can

Keep sensitive or legacy systems on-prem if that case
Send structured, validated data to your cloud lakehouse
Sync it in near real-time if have clear value there

5. Govern Before You Scale.

When someone pulls “Margin,” they need to know:
What it means
Where it came from
When it was last refreshed 

Assign data stewards per domain  
Define data flows between systems.
Establish business definitions for critical metrics

Don't let your legacy systems stop you

Comment “LEGACY” and I’ll send you the blueprint how to deal with legacy, without breaking the business

Most data teams are set up for failure. They create bureaucracy, not value. You can hire best engineers, buy best tools and still fail.

One mid-market company finally approves their “data investment.”
They hire their first data engineer. Maybe even head of data.

Spin up Snowflake. 
Maybe dbt.
Add 2 BI tools with an AI feature.

Six months later: same issues amplified

The engineer is buried in random Slack requests.
The CFO says, “We’re not getting ROI.”
Leadership starts whispering: “Maybe we just hired the wrong person.”

If your dashboards aren’t trusted and your data team looks “slow”
It’s because your operating model.

The truth is, 70% of data teams are set up to fail.

Seen this across our clients and 90% of the time, the problem wasn’t the stack or the people. 

It was how the team was positioned inside the business:

-No clear ownership model (who owns what data? who maintains it?)
-No definition of what success looks like beyond “more dashboards.”
-A data team buried under IT with 100 bosses and no mandate.
-Endless overengineering, copying Netflixs stack with a team of three.

By the time they realize it, the engineer’s burned out, adoption is low, fixes takes 12 months and the CEO’s lost trust data.

You can have every tool, hire the best engineer, and still have the same data problems. Tools and people just amplify an already good data team 

Most data teams create bureaucracy then value.  

Here is how to set up the data environment for succsess 

1. Start with problems, not roles.

Don’t hire anyone until you can name the 3–5 ways data can impact business directly. 
Most hire data scientists 

Otherwise, you’re building a reporting factory.

2. Define ownership before tools.

Map who owns what, by name. 
Every key domain (sales, finance, ops) has one accountable owner. 

No “shared responsibility.” 
That’s how data chaos starts.
The data team also decides and has the final word. 
No more hidden spreadsheets and so on. 

3. Set outcome-based goals.
Data teams shouldn’t be measured by tickets closed.

They should be measured by business impact.
That’s what executives actually care about.

4. Move Reporting to the Business.

This one is hard as I've seen working everything under the sun. 
If your Head of Data reports to IT, they’ll always optimize for infrastructure.
Move them under the people who actually care about ROI and impact. 

5. Centralize Data. Federate Execution.

Have one central team that defines rules, security, and data architecture 
but let embedded data partners execute inside the business units. 

They build one standardized data platform, then give teams freedom within that system with correct guidrails. In short, self-service right way. 

This way, you maintain speed, agility and control. 

The failure started in how you structured ownership, expectations, and accountability long before the first hire.

Your $1M data team is either your biggest edge or biggest cost center. Your $400k engineers are spending 80% time cleaning Excel files. Hiring won't fix data chaos, it just amplifies it. 

Your data people aren’t quitting because Google pays better.

No engineer wants to spend their days fixing pipelines held together by duct tape.
No analyst wants to reconcile “revenue” across six dashboards.
No data lead wants to explain, for the 50th time, why “the numbers don’t match.”

“We just can’t find or keep good data people.”
Most are set up to fail.

Here’s what they see:

Seven disconnected systems.
A dashboard graveyard no one trusts.
Constant firefighting and finger-pointing.
Zero clear ownership of data.

So they leave. 

Data team can be your biggest edge or biggest cost center. 
Great talents leaves for better environments, and where data actually aligns to business 

The best data teams can be your moat or cost center.

Here’s how to build and scale your data team.

1. Hiring is an amplifier 

You can’t fix chaos by hiring more.
Hiring is just amplification. 
It can be good or death. 

Start with this audit:

Do we have a single source of truth?
Do we know who owns each dataset?
Do we have consistent definitions for core metrics?

Rationalize your data stack.
Kill duplicate tools.
Unify your metrics in a semantic layer.
And for the love of ROI, document ownership.

Most new data hires are pushed into chaos and set up to fail with unrealistic expectations. 

2. Align it to Business Impact

Top talent wants to innovate, not babysit broken pipelines.
They want to solve business problems, not chase data discrepancies.

Reframe your projects to data products:
-“Build a new dashboard.” to "Reduce delivery time by 15%"

Measure the team on business outcomes. Not activity, maintenance. 

Where the data sit is important.
Is that CTO, CIO, CEO, it don't matter. I seen all the work. 
Make sure it sits where data has the biggest business impact 

If your data team spends 80% time cleaning, that's janitorial work.

3. Treat Data Like a Product

Your data team should own outcomes, not tickets.

Create data products with owners, roadmaps, and measurable ROI.
Stop letting random ad hoc requests drive your priorities.

4. Hire for Outcomes, Not Tools 

I've seen orgs hiring becuse someone knows Databricks. 
Then they wonder why they end up with 3124 dashboards. 

Hire not for titles as "Data Engineer" or tools. Hire for outcomes. 
Make sure each role owns responsibilities and clear succsess criteria.

4. Don't Turn Into Bureaucracy 

Most data teams, as scale turn into bureaucracy. 
Do more harm than good. 

The best data orgs are not choosing between federated and centralized they are choosing matrix. 

You centralize standards (platform), federate the impact. 
This way you get agility, speed while remaining control & impact

Comment “Team” and I’ll send you the playbook on how to build, scale your data team for max business impact.

Most data teams find out their data is wrong after the VP finds a $400k discrepancy 2-min prior meeting. You can have 99.9% uptime. But if the VP finds the error before you. Your data team failed 

The phrase "Data is accurate" has quietly cost companies millions and trust.

Because “fine” isn’t proof.
It’s an assumption.
And assumptions are where bad data hides best.

A mid-market data team told us proudly,

“Our dashboards are up. The data looks fine.”

Three weeks later, Finance caught a $400K “phantom revenue” error a few minutes prior most important meetings. 

Same dashboards. Same pipelines. Everything still looked fine.

The issue?
A small logic change in Salesforce never made it to dbt.
Every deal with a certain tag was double-counted.

Nobody noticed because:

-The data pipeline didn’t fail.
-The dashboard loaded.
-The metrics trended “normally.”

When they finally caught it, trust collapsed overnight.
Executives stopped using data.
The data team spent a month reconciling instead of delivering value.

The CFO said it bluntly:
“If we can’t trust the numbers, everything else is irrelevant.”

Most leaders think data breaks loudly.
It doesn’t.
It breaks quietly

Dashboards still work.
Queries still run.
The data just drifts, slightly wrong, every day, until it’s completely disconnected from reality.

Every “fine” assumption creates downstream waste:

-Finance reconciling numbers that don’t match.
-Ops running forecasts off incomplete data.
-Execs delaying decisions because they don’t trust dashboards.

Here’s what smart data teams to catch data issues proactivly, not reactive 

1. Validate, Don’t Assume

Don’t check if the pipeline ran; check if the numbers make sense
Run regular data profiling on key datasets: nulls, duplicates, and outliers.

Get important dates of VPs. Run proactive changes prior to that 

If something “feels fine,” challenge it.

2. Define What ‘Fine’ Actually Means 

“Fine” needs metrics, completeness %, timeliness, and consistency.


Set clear thresholds and treat them like SLAs.

3. Audit Business Logic Quarterly 

Your business changes every quarter.
Your metrics don’t, unless someone updates them.

Schedule recurring audits between Data + Finance + Ops to realign definitions and rules.

Don't be surprised if next month the VP says that doesn't trust the data. 

4. Build Trust Checks 

The most efficient place to fix data quality is upstream.

Examples:
Mandatory fields for pipeline-critical data.
Drop-downs instead of free text. 

Prevent upstream.

5. Make Data Quality Part of Business 

This isn’t IT’s job.
It’s an org-wide accountability problem.
Domains own data. 

By the time a dashboard is obviously broken, the real damage is already done:

Missed revenue, wrong decisions, lost confidence, and wasted months of work.

You don’t need more DQ tools.
You need validation, ownership, and accountability.

Because once trust is broken. It doesn't matter if your data is 99% accurate.

Everyone says they have "Single Source of Truth." But your Imaging data is in S3 buckets. Commercial in Snowflake. Genomic arrays across 6 other systems. You don’t win with more data, you win with usable data. 

Everyone says they are “data-driven.”

Here’s the reality:
12 systems. 6 clouds. Zero trust in data
Not an AI failure, an architecture failure 

Walk into any mid-sized biotech or pharma right now and you’ll see the same thing:

R&D runs on legacy genomics platforms
Clinical data lives in proprietary systems.
Imaging data sits in S3 folders with no metadata.
Commercial analytics lives in Snowflake or Databricks

Everything’s in silos but nothing talks. 

So when your head of research says, “Let’s run a cross-study model to predict responders,”

The data team goes silent

They know it’ll take three months just to merge datasets.
Half that time will be spent just defining what “sample” even means across systems.

That’s duct-tape engineering, it kills velocity 

Here’s the trap everyone falls into:

You “modernize” by adding another tool.
Each tool solves a local problem (ETL, storage, analytics).
Integration complexity doubles.

Everyone blames the data team, but it’s data architecture debt. 

The next generation of life sciences, pharma companies aren’t chasing “modern stacks.”

They’re building universal data architectures,  one foundation that handles every data type, every team, and every workflow.

That means:

Tables + images + genomics + vectors → one data structure.
Governance + lineage + access → one policy layer.
Analysis + AI → one compute engine.

Designed to work together from day one, that’s the universal model 

Here’s how top biotech and pharma teams are pulling this off:

1. Map the chaos.

Inventory every dataset, every format, every owner. 

Group them: 

Tabular 
Scientific arrays  
Imaging  
Text 
AI/Vector data 

Quantify what’s actually being used vs. what’s just rotting in cloud storage.

2. Standardize definitions

Most treat governance as a separate initiative. But it makes all work

“Sample,” “gene", all defined once, globally.
Centralized authentication across all datasets.
Version control, enabled by default
Unified access policies that span data types.

When an auditor asks, “Where did this result come from?” you can answer it instantly. 

3. Universal infrastructure

Move from “stacks per department” to one universal foundation that can store and query any data type.

With multidimensional arrays - a data structure that can represent any modality can be stored and processed

This eliminates the need to constantly convert between formats. 

4. Align to ROI

Once your data lives in a unified structure, you can query across modalities in seconds 

For example: 
Combine genomic data (arrays) with clinical trial data (tables) to identify responders
Or imaging + transcriptomics to accelerate biomarker discovery 

If dealing with multi-modal complex data, repost and check our newsletter on it

You spent $1m on AI strategy. But your 'Revenue' number changes depending on which dashboard you open. AI readiness isn’t "We have a data lake". It's someting else

Every boardroom 
“We need to be AI-ready.”
“Let’s invest in data infrastructure.”

Yet 80% of AI pilots fail not from bad ai models or missing talent, but from broken data models. 

Most companies sit on terabytes of data that can’t answer a single question confidently.
Their “revenue” number changes depending on which dashboard you open.

So when someone says, “Let’s build an AI use case,” here’s what happens:

Data scientists clean 80% of the time.
Finance and Ops argue over numbers.
Leadership loses patience and priority. 

But it’s not the AI that failed, it’s the foundation.

A retail CIO told me they tracked over 1B events daily every click, basket change, and impression. 

On paper, it looked advanced.
In reality, users couldn’t even tell if a customer added or removed an item from the cart because the system tracked states, not actions.

That’s what bad data modeling looks like at scale.

How To Fix The Thing That Is Killing Your AI & ML Plans 

1. Redefine the Purpose of a Data Model

A data model isn’t a schema it’s a representation of your business logic.

If your teams can’t align on “what’s a customer, what’s an order, what’s revenue,” you’re not ready for AI.

You’re ready for rework.

2. Move from Raw Data to Modeled Information

Don’t dump “state snapshots” (like every cart update).
Model “facts”  real business actions: 

“Product Added to Basket.”
“Payment Completed.”
“Account Churned.”

Each event should represent a meaningful business action.

3. Build a Semantic Layer 

Your AI doesn’t understand tables, it understands meaning.

A semantic layer defines core business metrics once and enforces them everywhere, dashboards, APIs, AI models.

No more “marketing’s revenue” vs “finance’s revenue.” 

4. Make It Modular

AI thrives on flexibility. 
Domains evolve independently (customer, transaction, product). 

Your model should have:

Decoupled domains  
Version-controlled schemas (so changes are tracked).
Automated tests for data quality. 

When your data model is tightly coupled every change breaks everything

5. Ontology provides meaning 

This is where advanced companies pull ahead.
Your data model isn’t just tables and joins 

Do this

Define relationships explicitly: “A Customer places Orders,” “An Order contains Products.”
Translate this into your data model structure  
Document these relationships using dbt docs.
Start mapping these into knowledge graphs.

Your AI doesn't know what "final_21" means. 
It understands relationships, meaning, and context. 

AI readiness isn’t “we have a data lake.”
It’s when your execs can make decisions from trusted, modeled data without asking an analyst to debug the pipeline.

If you can’t define your key entities and metrics with confidence,
you’re not ready for AI, you’re barely ready for basic reporting

Moving to new ERP won’t fix your data. You can spend $500k on Odoo, SAP, or NetSuite. But if your plant manager "fixes" inventory in a spreadsheet. No "data cleaning" project will solve it. 

We worked with a manufacturing firm that had 15 years of data in Sage, Excel, and a few random Access databases.

They thought the new ERP would solve their data problems.
But they just migrated the same bad data, definitions, and processes they had before. 

Seen it across manufacturing, food, and ag. 
They were migrating to Odoo and thought:
“Let’s clean everything. New ERP will give us a new start; it will remove bad data.”

So they did what everyone does:
Froze the ERP for “data cleanup"
Built a dozen Excel trackers and migrated.

Six months later?

Operations slowed to a crawl.
Finance couldn’t close the month.
Nobody knew which version of truth was real.

The business was bleeding time and trust.

They treat 'data cleaning' as a one-time event.
They think moving to a new ERP will solve all their data issues

Bad ERP data isn’t a technical issue. 
It’s a behavioral one.

-It’s a sales rep skipping CRM fields.
-A plant manager “fixing” inventory manually.
-Finance entering workarounds to close on time (Excel file name '_finalv3')

So when you try to clean or migrate to a new ERP it all at once without fixing ownership or process you’re moving problems with you.

Here’s the Playbook We Use  

We’ve done this across manufacturing, agrifood, and logistics firms 10-year legacy data.

1. Audit What Matters, Not Everything

Don’t clean everything. Start where bad data costs money (risk vs value)

Ask:
“If this data were wrong, what would it cost us?”

If it doesn’t move P&L or decision-making, it doesn’t make the first round.
Clean the 20% of data that drives 80% of your business.

2. Assign Ownership at the Source

Bad data comes due to bad process. 
Ops uses the wrong codes. Skipped fields in ERPs. 

Your data won’t stay clean until someone owns it.
Assign data stewards. 
Create a process so that bad data is impossible to happen. 
Make data quality part of the goal in that domain. 

3. Clean in Iterations, Not in a Big Bang

Forget the “6-month cleanup project.”
All clean-up projects are band-aid fixes.

Start with the lowest-hanging fruit first 
Audit → Clean → Validate 

Each iteration delivers visible ROI, faster close, and cleaner SKUs.

Momentum matters more than perfection.

4. Automate the Guardrails

If the VP notices the error before you. You lost.
Set up automated checks to catch mistakes before they spread.

Duplicates? Missing values? Invalid ranges?

Flag them in real-time, notify.
Fix it at the source, not six reports later.

5. Build the “Semantic Layer”  

Chaos returns fast if definitions differ.
Build a semantic layer a unified model defining what metrics mean 
Your legacy ERP is not the source of truth.

You don’t fix 15 years of bad data by "cleaning up" one time.
You don't fix it by migrating to new ERP.

Your spent $1M "data modernization" for AI-readiness and market edge. But ended up with more then 898 dashboards than employees that nobody uses. Thats not a data problem, that's adoption problem. 

Perfect Databricks setup.dbt pipelines humming. BI dashboards polished. Models training.  

And yet
Revenue teams were back in spreadsheets.
Finance couldn’t reconcile bookings to actuals.
Executives said, “We don’t trust the dashboards.”

The CIO asked us why adoption never took off.

Our answer was simple:
“You built a data platform. You never built data products.”

This is the quiet failure happening across 80% of enterprises we walk into.

The pattern is always the same:

Leadership funds a “modern data stack" or "ai readiness" 
IT builds pipelines, warehouses, dashboards.

Adoption flatlines. Nobody opens nothing. ROI vanishes.

Then panic hits add tools, hire a Head of Data, run AI pilots. Nothing moves. 

Because the core problem never changed:
They confused infrastructure for outcomes.

Data lake, warehouses, modernizations don't equal 'business impact' 
It's what you do with data, what makes it valuable. 

One global hospitality brand engaged recently didn’t make that mistake.
They didn’t stop at “centralized data.”

They turned it into products:
Loyalty models that forecast guest retention.
Privacy filters that automatically enforce data laws by country.

They built data capabilities, not data.

If you want adoption, trust, and ROI, here’s the blunt playbook:

1. Stop Building Everything. Pick One Business Outcome.

Start with biggest problems. Don't glorify complexity. 

That’s your first product. Not your first dataset or you think is 'nice'
Start there. Kill the rest (for now).

2. Write a Product Brief, Not a Jira Ticket.

Every initiative needs a product brief, not “give me sales data.” 

Make sure have:
- End User 
- Timeline
- Problem 
- Outcome 
- Definition of Done (Most miss this) 

3. Deliver a Minimum & Fast  

Your goal is not perfect "data model" in 12-18 months 

Your goal is prove the value and impact.
Ship fast, in iterartive cycles 

Ship something tangible in weeks.
70% ready now beats 100% in 12 months. 

Adoption starts when your product generates results, not when delivered. 

4. Feedback Makes Adoption 

Adoption doesn’t happen from launch day. It happens from feedback loops.

Set up a 30-minute weekly sync with your end users.
Gain feedback, then iterate quickly.

Slowly, the team won't be able to live without it. 
That’s your adoption signal. 

5. Build For Reeuse.

Stop solving the same problem five times.

All three depend on the same foundational data: cust

Instead of building three separate pipelines, build a Customer Data Product clean, defined, and reusable across every use case.

Best data teams that win treat data like a portfolio of products, not a pile of assets.
They measure business outcomes not number of tables, pipelines, or dashboards.

You spent $1m on “AI analysts,” “data copilots,” licenses and call it digital transformation. Congratulations. You just spent a fortune to automate your chaos. Here is why it's a trap.

Ask a question in plain English, get answer and be "data-driven".

But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: 
AI doesn’t fix your data problem. It just amplifes them. 

Leaders think “AI analysts” are the missing link to being data-driven.

They’re lipstick on fragmented data.

I’ve seen this movie a dozen times:

An exec team is frustrated. 
Want to be data driven.
Data requests take weeks.
So they buy the next shiny thing, an “AI analyst” call it "digital transformation".

Now, suddenly, anyone can “ask questions” in plain English:

“Show me revenue growth for Q3 by region.”
“Summarize top-performing therapies by adherence.”

The AI spits out charts and insights instantly.
Everyone cheers.

Then it happens.

The CFO asks one question:
“Where did this number come from?”

Silence.

And the lineage? Untraceable somewhere across 8 systems. 
Context nobody knows what links to what. 

Congratulations, you’ve automated your chaos, spent $1m on license. 

AI doesn’t understand truth.
It predicts patterns.

If your data is fragmented, biased, or inconsistently defined, AI doesn’t fix it it just reveals data issues. 

AI didn’t fail.
The data strategy and data foundation did.

Here’s what real data-driven companies will do in 2026 to win.

1. Fix Ownership Before You Automate Anything.

If Finance doesn’t own Finance data and Sales doesn’t own Sales data, your “AI analyst” has no single source of truth.

Feeding raw, undefined data to AI or a VP never ends well. 

2. Build a Semantic Layer.

Without standardized definitions, your AI will pick whichever “revenue” field it finds first

It won't know is it 'rev_v2' or 'rev3_final'  
Need to have clear consumption layer. 

Define metrics, enforce one version of truth.

3. Context, Lineage.

If someone is asking "Where this from?",  I bet they trust their wrong excel file over your new ai pilot. 

Metadata and lineage aren’t compliance they’re the foundation for trust and AI.

If it doesn’t know how entities connect, what defines them, or what each metric means

AI without context is usless. 

4. Run AI on Trusted Data, Not All Data.

If you can’t defend the dataset in a board meeting, your AI shouldn’t be querying it.
Set clear guidrails, alerts and fix data in source. 

Certify your Tier 1 datasets and restrict everything else.

5. Start Solving Imporant Problems 

Data is only value if used to impact end user. 
Create consumption marts layers aligned to end user need and built data products. 

You don’t need more dashboards.
You need reusable data products that solve real end-user problems:  

"Detected 80% of patients on a failed therapy within 30 days
preventing 8 out of 10 from ineffective treatment."

The orgs that win in 2026 will be which use trusted data as market edge.

Every company has that one custom pipeline that breaks right when VP looks at it. If your engineers are spending 70% of time fixing pipelines, you don't have a data team. 

Every company has that one custom data pipeline.
Built by the smartest engineer on the team.
Works (most of the time).
And supposedly “saved” you hundreds of thousands in vendor fees.

The problem?
It’s a time bomb.

When I talk to mid-market firms, I always hear the same story:

“We built it ourselves because it was cheaper, needed something fast to work”

Six months later…

That “free” pipelines has turned into a full-time maintenance job.
Your data engineers spend nights fixing schema drift.
Your new hires waste weeks trying to understand undocumented code.
It breaks at times right when VP looking at the data, 2min ago worked fine.
And your CFO still doesn’t trust the numbers in the dashboard.

Let’s do the math:
Two engineers, three months of work.
$150K annualized salary.
You just spent ~$30k to “build” it. 

But here’s what you didn’t factor in:

30–40% of those engineers’ time now spent keeping it alive.
2–3 months of onboarding every time someone leaves.
Countless hours lost when it breaks right before an exec review.
Missed opportunities because your team’s firefighting instead of innovating.

That $75K build?
Turns into $1.2M+ in lost productivity and opportunity cost over three years.

Here is what to do rather. 

1. Audit the True Cost

What is your data team working on? 
What is the requests, and data initatives (data products) they are shipping? 
Calculate time spent of your data team

Most data teams 70% of time spent on maitainance rather then driving impact.

2. Kill the Zombie Tools

Every organization has 2–3 internal tools or legacy pipelines no one dares to touch.  

Archive, replace, or sunset anything that:
Has no clear business owner. Don't bring ROI. Was built to just have smth.  

Seen recent finance org running redundent pipelines, they didn't need. 
They took more time to maintain, for 0 impact. 

3. Buy the Plumbing, Build the Differentiation

Your engineers should be building the data products that drive growth - not re-inventing connectors to Salesforce.

Buy what’s solved. 
Build only what creates a business advantage.
Buy boring. Build brilliant.

4. Force ROI Discipline

Before any “custom build,” or "data product"  ask one question:

“What’s the measurable business outcome?”

If there’s no answer, it’s not a project, it’s aligning on wrong outcomes.

Can't start building nothing, if dont have outcome, data, problem solving, definition of done, why and sign off. 

5. Move From Maintenance Mode → Innovation Mode

If your engineers are spending more time fixing than delivering, you don’t have a data team  you have a repair crew

Automate the repeatable
Buy managed infrastructure
Let your team focus on data, AI, and decisions that move the business

Your “free” pipeline isn’t free
It’s costing you growth, talent, and trust

Every manufacturer says they’re “data-driven.”  You are capturing 200,000 live machine signals every second.  But your Plant Manager still relies on a spreadsheet to run the shift.

Dashboard or warehouse doesn't make data into profit. 
You do it by turning 200,000 live machine signals into a single, trusted truth.

Most manufacturing plants are swimming in data they don’t trust.

The historian says one thing.
MES says another.
Finance has a third version in Excel.

And every plant manager walks into the Monday OEE meeting with a different “truth.”

One industrial firm we worked was no different, until we asked a smarter question:
“Why do all these systems tell different stories about the same line?”

The answer: context.

Every torque spike, temperature reading, or batch number existed in isolation.

They had signals, not meaning.

So instead of buying another tool, they built a context layer, a unified data model that linked every machine tag, batch, and process to the business logic behind it.

Once that layer existed, every dashboard pulled from one definition.
OEE, downtime, yield,  calculated once, reused everywhere.

They didn’t “modernize.”
They standardized.

Before:

Operators got hundreds of alerts a day.
Engineers wasted hours reconciling versions of “truth.”
Leadership didn’t trust data.

After:

Every sensor was mapped to its line, batch, and product.
All plants used one version of OEE.
Operators could query live data without waiting on IT.

Result?

8% productivity lift.
Downtime detection dropped by 94%.
Savings +$100,000 
1,200+ hours saved annually in manual reconciliation.
Fewer false alarms.

A data foundation trusted from the floor to the boardroom.

Not because of AI or 'digital twins'
Because they fixed context.

Here’s the same 5-step model we deploy with manufacturers who want to stop drowning in signals and use data for profit. 

1. Inventory your data sources.
List every PLC, historian, MES, ERP, and spreadsheet. If you don’t know where data lives, you’ll never control it.

2. Map your relationships.
Tie each signal to its machine, line, batch, and business process.
This creates the skeleton for your context layer.

3. Define semantics once.
Build a semantic layer one OEE, one yield, one definition of downtime  version-controlled, governed, and reused everywhere.

4. Architect for latency.
Keep real-time processing at the edge; push contextualized data to the cloud.
Insights should reach operators in seconds, not hours. 

5. Tie back into action

A “single source of truth” is meaningless if it doesn’t feed back into operations.
Detect → Diagnose → Recommend → Act → Learn.

Every manufacturer wants a “digital twin.”
But if your data is still siloed, inconsistent, or delayed, you don’t need a twin 
you need a single version of the truth.

Best firms are leveraging data for profit, not reporting.
They connected their context.
This when being a cost center and get a competitive edge.

Your global data strategy failed. You have 200 different definitions of 'Revenue' and every regional team swears its version is correct.  

Every global company says they want to “be data-driven.”

Then reality hits:
20 countries.
More dashboards than FTEs
200 different definitions of “Revenue.”

Each regional team swears its version is correct.

Sound familiar?
That’s the governance agility trap.

You either centralize and kill innovation or decentralize and kill trust. 
Here’s what every global organization should copy today.

When you operate across 10, 20, or 30 markets, you hit the same wall.

Global wants consistency, governance, one version of truth.
Regions want speed, flexibility, control. 

If you standardize too much, you kill agility.
If you decentralize too much, you lose trust. 

Most companies end up bloated governance decks and Excel chaos.
That’s bureaucracy at scale.

One huge telecom org faced this exact problem.

20+ OpCos across Europe, Africa, and Asia each with its own data stack.
Revenue in Portugal didn’t match Germany.
Regional teams, were constrained. 

They launched a global data modernization to standardize without killing agility. 

Most companies fail right here.

Here’s why:
Don't start by standardizing tools.
Start by standardizing meaning.

Before migrating a single dataset, they built a Universal Semantic Layer 

It defined what core parts meant across every market.
Once those definitions were locked.

That became the single governed layer every market could build from.

Global = consistent.
Local/Regional = flexible.

Teams could finally speak the same language, while remaining flexible top to bottom.

Governance became invisible, built into the design, not enforced.

1. Build a Semantic Layer, Not Just a Cloud Layer,

Start with 10–15 global metrics every market must align on. 
Standardize parts on the Group level; you don't align on everything at a high level as impossible.

Define business logic once and reuse it everywhere.
That’s how you scale governance and self-service.

2. Automate Governance

Every metric definition, data transformation, and business rule needs to be version-controlled and reusable.

The result:
One governed layer.
20+ autonomous markets.
Zero manual governance overhead. 

3. Federate Ownership in Guidrails

Let markets own local regional extensions, products, and metrics as long as they build on the global foundation.

Have a regional/local consumption layer for their uniqe needs. 
That keeps truth, control, and flexibility aligned top to bottom.

This way, global and regional don't clash.

Create a shared foundation, not a shared dictatorship.
Let markets innovate on top.

4. Measure Adoption, Not Dashboards

Instead of forcing global "data" or "dashboards", focus on data consistency and transparency.
Every query is pulled from the same governed layer.
Every number was explainable, traceable, and identical all across.

Focus on trust, adoption before moving

Your 2026 data strategy will dictate whether your data is your competitive edge or a cost center. 

Most “modern” data teams aren’t modern. 

They’ve swapped SQL for dbt, on-prem for Snowflake, and reports for dashboards, but are experiencing the same issues as before.

We’ve seen this movie dozens of times:

A company finally “gets serious” about data.
They hire a Head of Data/CIO rebuild the stack, and buy another three tools to “modernize.”
By month 18, dashboards are broken, business trust is gone, and the data team is buried in requests.

The CFO’s asking why Snowflake costs more than AWS, and the COO is asking why decisions still take weeks.

CEO was expecting "AI-readiness" and a competitive edge, but got inaccurate data and dashboards.

So, they rebuild again.
New VP. New consultants. New stack. 
Same story.

80% of Mid-Market Firms Will Rebuild Their Data Teams by 2026
Not because technology failed, but because strategy did.

The pattern is brutally consistent:

No operating model.
Data teams are set up like IT help desks, not product teams.
They react. They don’t drive outcomes.

No ownership.
No one actually owns data quality, definitions, or adoption.
Everyone “uses data.” No one’s accountable for it.

No alignment.
Data priorities live in a vacuum, disconnected from revenue, margin, and growth metrics

The teams that win in 2026 will look nothing like this.

They’ll be lean, embedded, and outcome-driven.
They’ll measure business impact, not ticket volume.
They’ll be architected around decisions, not datasets.
And they’ll run like product lines, not projects.

They don’t rebuild every 18 months because their foundation is flexible, not fragile.
They can pivot tools, AI layers, or priorities without tearing the whole thing apart.

Every exec thinks they’re modernizing.
But what they’re really doing is re-platforming.

They’re buying tech to fix symptoms created by a broken strategy.
They’re automating chaos.
They’re integrating, hiring faster… into dysfunction.

This is why “Data Strategy 2026” matters,  because the fix isn’t another migration or AI tool.

It’s a full reset of how mid-market firms design their data strategy 

The high-performing data teams we work with share the same five traits:

1. Business ownership of outcomes.
Data exists to drive P&L impact, not dashboards.

2. Clear operating model.
Every function knows what data it owns, what it produces, and how it’s consumed.

3. Modular architecture.
Replaceable components. Reusable pipelines. Zero rebuild anxiety.

4. AI-ready foundations.
They focus on governance, semantics, and trust,  not LLM buzzwords.

5. Short-cycle delivery.
They show measurable wins in 90 days, not 9 months.

That’s the future. 

You don’t have a “data” problem.
You have a strategy problem to turn your data into a market edge.

Comment "2026" for our 2026 Data Strategy executive report on what next-generation, data-driven organizations are prioritizing in 2026.

taplio

The Battle

Brendan Dell

Ali Z

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreBrendan Dell's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAli Z's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Brendan Dell

Ali Z

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Brendan Dell's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAli Z's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreBrendan Dell's LinkedIn Performance