The best data strategy I’ve seen fit on a single page.
I used to build those decks. Forty slides. Beautiful diagrams. Comprehensive coverage. Nobody read past slide six.
Then a CTO told me something I didn’t want to hear: “Just tell me what we’re doing, why, and what it costs.” That stung. But she was right.
Now I use a one-pager. Six sections. Current state. Desired state. The gap between them. A quarterly roadmap - not yearly, because yearly plans in data are fiction. Success metrics tied to business outcomes, not pipeline uptime. And the investment required in actual euros and headcount.
The hard part isn’t fitting it on one page. It’s forcing yourself to prioritize. Every initiative needs to answer one question: does this drive revenue, reduce cost, or reduce risk? If it’s “we need better data” without connecting to one of those three, it doesn’t make the page.
I’ll be honest - I resisted this approach. It felt like oversimplifying. Turns out, the constraint made the thinking sharper.
What’s on your data strategy one-pager right now - and what did you have to cut?