One thing I end up doing with a lot of businesses is improving visibility across the organisation. Not just through reporting for leadership teams or monthly board packs, but by making performance far more visible to the people running the business day to day.
Because something very interesting happens when teams can clearly see the numbers.
People start to understand how the company is actually performing. Not just the polished version. The real version. The good, the bad and the ugly.
Teams are often working hard inside their own functions without really seeing how the wider business is behaving. Marketing is chasing growth while operations are struggling with fulfilment. Product teams are building features without visibility into customer churn. Customer service is hearing recurring complaints that never properly feed back into decision-making.
Once performance becomes more visible, those disconnects start disappearing.
What Happens When the Numbers Become Harder to Ignore
I've seen businesses change behaviour remarkably quickly simply because the numbers became harder to ignore. When conversion drops, everybody sees it. When repeat purchase rate improves, everybody sees it. When returns spike or customer complaints rise, it becomes part of the conversation rather than something buried three layers deep in reporting.
Here's a real example. When I was brought in to turn around a struggling vaping brand acquired by British American Tobacco, one of the first things I did was put the numbers on the wall — literally. A whiteboard session with the team: here are the 10 issues we faced in 2018, here's where we were on every KPI, and here's what we're going to focus on next.
That session mattered because it created shared understanding. Everyone in the room could see the same problems at the same time. And importantly, it created shared ownership — because the roadmap was built together, not handed down.
This Is Not About Creating a Blame Culture
In fact, the opposite is usually true.
The best businesses create shared ownership around performance. They remove emotion and politics from discussions because everyone is looking at the same reality. Instead of debating opinions, teams start asking better questions. Why are customers dropping off? Why is one category outperforming another? Why are support tickets increasing after a product release?
That shift is incredibly valuable because it changes how businesses make decisions.
One of the biggest opportunities I see in growing companies is using operational performance to shape the product roadmap. Too many roadmaps are still driven by internal opinion, seniority, or whoever shouts the loudest. But the real signals are nearly always sitting inside the operational data.
If repeat purchasing is weaker than expected, maybe the CRM journey needs rebuilding. If customer service teams are seeing the same pain points repeatedly, that should directly influence what gets built next.
A Real Example — From Decline Back to Growth
The vaping brand turnaround was a direct application of this thinking. We started by getting total clarity on where every KPI actually stood — not the version people wanted to present upwards, but the real numbers. Thirteen metrics, tracked honestly, with the 2017 performance alongside the 2018 target.
New customers had gone from −43% to +32% year on year. Won-back customers had surged from +46% to +152%. Second orders improved from −36% to +19%. These weren't accidents — they were the result of having the whole team aligned on where the problems were and what needed to move.
Some metrics were still red. Sessions and revenue were still declining. But having them visible meant we could have honest conversations about why, and make decisions accordingly — rather than pretending they weren't happening.
The word on that board — Stabilisation — matters too. We weren't declaring victory. We were naming the phase we were in and being clear about what success looked like for that period. That clarity is underrated.
The Cultural Shift Is More Important Than the Dashboard
What I also like about better visibility is that it tends to increase organisational maturity very quickly. Teams become more commercially aware. People begin understanding the drivers behind growth, margin, retention and customer behaviour. Conversations improve because everyone has context.
And over time, the business starts becoming more proactive instead of reactive.
You need fewer long meetings because people can already see what is happening. You need fewer escalations because issues become visible earlier. Teams begin self-correcting because performance is no longer hidden.
That cultural shift is often far more important than the dashboard itself.
- Visibility changes behaviour — teams self-correct when performance is visible, rather than waiting for a leadership intervention
- Shared ownership replaces blame — when everyone sees the same numbers, conversations become about solutions not politics
- Operational data should drive the product roadmap — not internal opinion or whoever shouts the loudest
- Name the phase you're in — clarity about what success looks like right now is underrated
- The cultural shift matters more than the dashboard — the tool is the enabler, not the outcome
Ultimately, better visibility is not really a reporting exercise. It is a leadership decision. It says we want transparency, accountability and shared understanding. It says we are willing to confront reality quickly instead of managing by assumption.
And in my experience, the businesses that do this well almost always make better decisions faster.