Governance isn't bureaucracy
The word 'governance' makes most operators reach for the skip button. It sounds like compliance paperwork and committee sign-offs. But at a scaling company, data governance is just the practice of making sure everyone in the business is working from the same numbers. The alternative is the weekly meeting where finance's revenue number and sales' revenue number don't match — and nobody knows why.
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Start with a metric dictionary
The highest-leverage governance initiative for most scaling companies is a metric dictionary: a single document (or wiki page, or dbt model) that defines every key business metric. What does 'active user' mean? What's included in 'revenue'? Is churn calculated on seats or accounts? These definitions, once agreed and written down, prevent entire categories of confusion. Start here before building any dashboards.
Automate the governance, not just the data
The best governance systems are built into the data infrastructure, not enforced through human process. dbt tests run automatically and alert when metric definitions are violated. Looker's LookML defines metrics once and makes it impossible for different dashboards to calculate them differently. This is governance that doesn't slow teams down — it runs in the background and catches problems before they reach leadership.
Ankit Parihar
Founder & Principal Data Consultant · Paris, France