The CEO Who Stopped Asking for Permission to See Her Own Data

A 180 person eCommerce company that has four brands under one umbrella. They have a full data stack, BigQuery, Power BI, a Head of Analytics, the works.

The CEO is in a weekly leadership meeting. Her Marketing Director asks about customer retention in their fastest-growing brand. What should be a simple question turns into a chore. The question is why? The data exists and they have all the tools.

Her Head of Analytics says something like ."I can pull that together by Thursday."

That evening, she tries Power BI herself. Twenty minutes of clicking through dashboards, filtering, second-guessing which view has what. She gives up and Slacks the analytics lead at 10pm.

Here's the absurdity: she runs the company. But she can't get a straight answer about the business without putting in a ticket.

This Isn't a One-Off. It's a Data Access Problem.

Talk to any CEO, COO, or VP Ops at a scaling company. They'll tell you the same story with different details.

A Google Cloud and Harvard Business Review survey found that 97% of business leaders believe organisation-wide access to data is critical to success. And yet, a Seagate study revealed that 68% of available enterprise data goes completely unleveraged.

So what is happening here? The data exists. However the people who need it most i.e the ones making the decisions often can't get to it.

It seems that this is because every answer requires someone else's time, someone else's queue, someone else's priorities. In fast-paced industries like retail, eCommerce, and tech, data analysts spend up to 50-70% of their time fielding ad-hoc requests. They're not doing strategic analysis. They're being human query engines.

"I'll get back to you Thursday" has become the accepted norm. We've stopped questioning it.

The Real Cost of Waiting

Every time a leader waits for data, one of two things happens: the decision gets delayed, or it gets made on gut feel.

When an analyst drops strategic work to pull a number for the fifth time that week, the backlog grows. When a CEO gives up on the BI tool and sends a 10pm Slack instead, nothing changes. The pattern reinforces itself.

Meanwhile, the tools keep multiplying. More dashboards. More data sources. More complexity. But the fundamental problem remains: the person most accountable for business outcomes is still one step removed from actually understanding them.

What Self-Serve Analytics Actually Looks Like

"Self-serve analytics" gets thrown around a lot. Usually it means "we bought Tableau and now everyone can theoretically build their own dashboards."

That's not self-serve. That's just shifting the burden.

Real self-serve looks different. Imagine that same CEO could simply ask:

"What's our 90-day retention rate for the home goods brand, compared to last quarter?"

And get an answer in 30 seconds. In plain English. With context on why it changed.

No tickets. No waiting. No 10pm Slack messages. No learning a new tool.

She stops working around her own systems and starts working with them. She makes decisions in the meeting, not three days later when the moment has passed.

This also frees up time for her Head of Analytics. They finally get to do actual analysis instead of fielding the same questions on repeat.

The Shift That's Coming

This isn't about replacing analysts. It's about freeing them.

The companies that figure this out will move faster. Their leaders will be closer to the numbers. Their analysts will focus on the work that actually moves the needle. And "I'll get back to you Thursday" will start to sound as outdated as it should.

The question isn't whether your data infrastructure is good enough. It probably is. The real question is whether the people who need answers can actually get them without going through a gatekeeper, without learning a new platform, without waiting three days for a number that already exists.

This is the problem we think about every day at Milo. What happens when the CEO can just ask?

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