The most impactful questions are the ones no one anticipated.
Dashboards (and semantic layers) are built around the questions you already knew to ask. But the questions that actually move a business forward, the urgent ones, the weird ones, the ones that surface mid-meeting, never fit a pre-built template.
If you don’t know where the number came from, you won’t trust it. If you don’t trust it, you won’t use it.
Speed without trust is worthless. When an answer can’t be easily and visually verified, people quietly fall back on gut instinct, and the entire analytics investment goes unused. We’ve seen it happen in every data org we’ve worked with. White boxes get used, black boxes get ignored.
The business already knows what to ask. The best data teams make sure they can.
The bottleneck in most organizations isn’t curiosity, it’s access. Somewhere along the way, data teams got stuck building semantic layers instead of enabling the questions that matter. Zoë sets herself up precisely because data teams need to do compounding work that moves the business, not tweak YAML files.
These beliefs are the short version. The manifesto is where we go deeper on the data-to-decision gap and the future we’re building toward.
Read the Manifesto →