Issue 001: Centralize your truth before you scale

Jan 14, 2026 • governance, data-engineering, workflows

The signal

Most teams do not fail because they lack data. They fail because they have too many versions of the same truth.

Why it matters

Dashboards turn into debates instead of decision tools.
Delivery slows because validation becomes manual.
Trust erodes quietly, then stalls execution.

My take

The hardest part is not picking tools. It is choosing one place where truth is defined and making every downstream system inherit it.

Most teams only discover they skipped this step when two dashboards disagree in a leadership meeting and no one can explain why. That moment is not a tooling problem. It is a governance gap that was deferred.

If I were building this

List the 10 metrics or entities that trigger the most disagreement.
Assign a single owner per definition. No shared ownership.
Store definitions in Git and review changes the same way you review code.
Make pipelines consume definitions, not recreate them.

Demo idea

Build a tiny definition registry in Git and show how one change flows into models and dashboards.

This is not about control. It is about reducing friction so decisions can move.