Most leadership teams are not short on data — they’re drowning in it.

Quarterly reviews are filled with charts, dashboards, and performance reports. Yet despite the volume of information, decisions still feel slower than they should. Teams debate whose numbers are “right.” Strategy shifts year over year, but execution doesn’t seem to follow. Leaders are left asking a familiar question: Why aren’t our metrics helping us move faster and more confidently?

Often, the issue isn’t the data itself. It’s how the data is structured, and whether it’s truly connected to strategy.

That is where many organizations confuse dashboards with direction. And where a control tower approach, grounded in a clear metric hierarchy, can make the difference between observing performance and actively steering it.

# Why Dashboards Alone Fall Short

Dashboards are useful but limited. At best, they act as a rearview mirror, showing what happened yesterday in a specific area of the business. They summarize activity, but they don’t inherently guide action.

A control tower, by contrast, functions as a “decision-support engine” that orchestrates your entire end-to-end operation in real time. Rather than presenting isolated metrics, a control tower connects data across the enterprise to support coordinated, strategic decisions.

It structures metrics hierarchically, from a few tightly honed executive key performance indicators (KPIs) down to the multitude of operational measures that demonstrate progress toward those KPIs. This metric hierarchy ensures every piece of data you collect plays a role in advancing the organizational vision.

# Signs Your Metrics Aren’t Supporting Strategy

Many leaders assume that better dashboards will naturally lead to better decisions. In practice, that connection often breaks down. One industry survey found that just over half of dashboard users reported they couldn’t interact meaningfully with the data in front of them — a clear signal that visibility alone doesn’t translate into insight.

When metrics aren’t clearly tied to strategic goals, a few common symptoms tend to surface:

  • Strategy changes too frequently. Leaders adapt plans year over year based on shifting insights, but frequent pivots create confusion and erode confidence. This often signals a lack of clarity around core KPIs.
  • Time is spent defending data instead of using it. When metrics don’t align (or aren’t trusted), leaders spend more time reconciling numbers than acting on them.
  • Data confidence is low. If teams don’t believe the data tells a consistent story, dashboards won’t serve as a reliable basis for decision-making.
  • Decisions are reactive, not predictive. Without the right leading indicators, organizations are left responding to outcomes rather than anticipating them.

Ultimately, if teams can’t clearly answer the question ‘So what?’ when reviewing performance data, they aren’t managing the business — they’re simply observing it. Moving from what happened to what it means to what we should do next requires more than reporting. It requires structure.

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# The Role of a Metric Hierarchy

In theory, KPIs should tie to clear value drivers, such as revenue growth, cost reduction, operational efficiency, or customer satisfaction. In practice, organizations often adopt dozens of KPIs. Every piece of data feels important.

Over time, this creates noise, and dashboards begin to multiply. When it’s time to review metrics and extract insights, it becomes difficult to see how everything fits together.

Some organizations attempt to solve this by investing in new tools or sophisticated reporting platforms. But new tools don’t resolve misalignment. Without a strategy for how metrics connect to business outcomes, those challenges simply carry forward in a new system.

A control tower approach brings order to this complexity by establishing a metric hierarchy — a hierarchical framework that links every data point back to organizational strategy.

# How Control Towers Create Clarity Between Metrics and Strategy

Creating a metric hierarchy helps teams understand not only what they are measuring, but why it matters — making it easier to move from insight to action.

At the top of the hierarchy are Level 1 metrics: a small number of executive KPIs that show whether the organization is advancing toward its strategic goals. These are the metrics leadership relies on to steer the business, often reflecting value drivers such as revenue growth or cost reduction.

Below them sit Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and other supporting metrics that ultimately feed into Level 1 metrics — the operational and functional measures that explain why those top-level KPIs are performing the way they are. While these metrics may be lower in the hierarchy, they are essential for understanding performance and identifying where intervention is needed.

For example, if cost reduction is a Level 1 metric, the metrics beneath it should track the specific actions that contribute to overall cost savings. When structured correctly, this hierarchy allows leaders to move seamlessly from high-level performance signals to the operational levers that influence them.

# Why Lower-Level Metrics are Early Indicators of Performance

Lower-level metrics often act as early indicators of performance. When they align with top-level KPIs, they help teams anticipate outcomes rather than react to them.

When they don’t align, it’s a signal that something is off. Common issues include:

  • Metrics are defined or measured differently across teams
  • Inconsistent calculations or data sources
  • Metrics that don’t clearly map back to higher-level goals

A control tower helps uncover and resolve these issues by defining and organizing metrics consistently across the organization. By aligning teams at every level to shared KPIs, you’re creating a centralized control tower that instills trust that data is telling the right story at the right time.

# Define Strategic Targets and the Metrics Will Follow

A control tower helps users identify what data truly matters in achieving business objectives. That’s why it’s essential that the executives who set strategy also define the vision that shapes the control tower framework.

Organizations often fall into the trap of letting functional teams determine metrics based on what can be measured. Instead, those teams should connect lower-level metrics to the Level 1 KPIs defined by leadership. This top-down approach ensures metrics are aligned to strategy and that you’re measuring what actually matters.

Corporate strategy defines the objectives targeted by your KPIs. Teams can identify the supporting metrics that help achieve those KPIs. As teams start identifying lower-level metrics, it’s important to look for simple opportunities to demonstrate the value of this new approach. Building a control tower is not a quick process, but early wins can help expand buy-in and reinforce this new way of organizing data.

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# Are You Data-Heavy or Data-Driven?

As many organizations are learning, collecting data alone doesn’t make you data-driven. What matters is having a clear strategy for how data is used to advance business objectives.

Cutting through the noise of disconnected metrics can be difficult when teams are operating across dashboards that don’t tell a consistent story. A control tower approach helps bring focus and clarity by aligning metrics to strategy and creating a more connected view of performance.

When metrics are aligned, trusted, and actionable, organizations can move beyond reporting toward confident decision-making — using data not just to understand what happened, but to guide what comes next.

If you’re looking for support in bringing structure and clarity to your metrics, Propeller helps organizations design metric hierarchies and control tower frameworks that connect performance to strategy.