A million-dollar solution for a trillion-dollar problem
by carlos avendañoMost BI / analytics tools rely on two premises:
a) BI is a top-down, specialized role
b) data input should all be automated
Product-wise, it means adding yet another dashboard, (re)training the management team, hiring analysts, more tool integrations. Awful.
Once metrics are owned by “others” (managers, tools, processes), employees lose agency and incentive misalignment soars.
Plus, most of these tools are too pricey and powerful for SMEs, adding extra complexity to businesses that could be run on Excel + Slack.
Show me the TAM! The Principal-Agent Problem is a trillion-dollar problem, my friends, inherent to all Orgs. The more complex a system is, the less agency employees have and the harder it is to extract the right information to act upon.
When employees’ and managers’ incentives diverge, information bias, moral hazard, analysis paralysis, micro-management... all become entrenched.
How to solve it?
Not all business conversations are data-driven; but those that are, must start, evolve and end in a metric. Charts are a top, inductive tool for humans to discovering real, actionable insights. By "blending" the best out of a spreadsheet, a database and an instant messenger, we can define a new, simpler decision-support system protocol.
That's our vision at Monetr.
Our bottom-up, contrarian bet is to give the employee a tool to communicate and share something she is in a unique spot to grasp. No stick, all carrot. Less dashboards, more peer-reviewed charts.
As Eugene Wei once said, we are all status-seeking monkeys. Hence, the more useful a metric reported and shared, the higher the employee's status among her peers.
