Your 50-person company doesn’t need an enterprise data strategy. You need to answer five questions.
I’ve watched founders stall for months because “data strategy” sounds like something only enterprises do. Meanwhile, their team collects everything, stores it everywhere, and answers nothing useful.
Here’s what data strategy actually means at your stage - five questions:
What decisions are you making blindly? “Should we hire another sales rep?” needs pipeline data. “Which features do users actually use?” needs product analytics. Start there.
What’s the smallest dataset that answers those? You don’t need a data lake. You need three tables that actually get updated.
Who owns each number? One metric, one owner. No committees, no shared responsibility.
How fresh does it need to be? Real-time costs 10x what daily batch costs. Most decisions work fine with yesterday’s numbers.
What’s your first win? One automated report that replaces a manual spreadsheet. Start there.
I used to overthink this - treated data strategy like a research project instead of a decision-making tool. The best strategies I’ve seen fit on two pages and get updated quarterly.
Start with decisions. Work backward to data.
What’s the business question your team can’t answer with current data? That’s where your strategy starts.