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Services / Business & Digital Strategy / KPI & Analytics Framework
4 weeks · senior-led · north-star + live dashboard

Measure what matters. Ignore the rest. Align the team.

A 4-week engagement that designs your KPI tree, picks the north-star metric your whole business orbits, ships the live dashboard, and trains the team to actually use it. So your Monday standup stops being "what did we ship" and becomes "what did we move."

4 weeks Live dashboard Board-ready scorecard From R8,000

Four ways your KPI report tells you nothing you can act on.

SA exco meetings have one universal trait: 50 slides of charts and no decisions made. Why? Because the metrics are wrong. Here's the pattern.

!

Vanity over value

Twitter followers. Website hits. Trial signups. Numbers that go up forever and tell you nothing. They feel like progress, they're not. Boards eat them, businesses starve.

"Website traffic up 40% MoM!"
!

Lagging everything

Revenue. Margin. Customer count. Numbers from last quarter. Useful for accounting; useless for steering. By the time the chart shows a problem, it's six months old.

"Q1 revenue: R 38M ✓"
!

Five different truths

Finance's revenue number disagrees with Sales' revenue number disagrees with the dashboard. No single source of truth = no trust = each team builds their own spreadsheet.

"Whose number is the right one?"
!

Nobody owns anything

The dashboard has 47 metrics. None of them have a person. When churn spikes, who fixes it? When activation drops, who calls the meeting? Diffuse accountability = no accountability.

"That's an ops problem… or marketing's…"

One. Five. Fifteen.

Every healthy KPI framework has the same shape. One north-star at the top — what the business is for. Five leading indicators below it — what moves the north-star. Fifteen operational metrics at the base — what each team owns weekly.

North-star metric
The one number that captures the value the business creates. Aligns every team. Updated monthly.
1
metric
Leading indicators
Inputs that drive the north-star. Each predicts the north-star 30-90 days ahead. Owned by a function lead. Weekly cadence.
5
metrics
·
Operational metrics
What each team manages day-to-day. Trade-offs visible. Tied to specific leading indicators. Owned by team leads.
15
metrics

One metric. Five tests.

Most teams pick the wrong north-star — too far from value, too easy to game, or too lagging. We score candidate metrics against five tests; only candidates that pass all five make the cut.

  • Customer value — does moving this number mean a customer got value? If yes, it's a real north-star. If no, it's vanity.
  • Leading the lag — it predicts revenue 30-90 days ahead, not after. Revenue itself is the wrong north-star.
  • Cross-functional — every team can move it. If only marketing or only product can affect it, it's a function metric, not a north-star.
  • Hard to game — boosting it without creating customer value is structurally difficult. Vanity metrics fail this test.
  • Measurable + accessible — you can measure it today, you'll measure it the same way in 12 months, the team understands it without a glossary.
  • Sensitive to action — when a team ships a real improvement, the metric moves within a quarter, not a year.
Real examples

Six business models. Six different north-stars.

The north-star is industry-shaped. A SaaS north-star doesn't fit an e-commerce business; an e-comm north-star doesn't fit a marketplace. Here's how the shape changes by model.

B2B SaaS

Subscription software

North star
Active monthly revenue
  • Activation rate Lead
  • Net retention Lead
  • SQL → paid Lead
  • Feature adoption Op
  • Support tickets/user Op
E-commerce

D2C / retail online

North star
Net revenue per customer
  • Repeat purchase rate Lead
  • Cart-to-checkout % Lead
  • Return rate Lead
  • Avg order value Op
  • Email click-through Op
Marketplace

Two-sided platform

North star
Matched-transaction value
  • Supply-side activation Lead
  • Search → match % Lead
  • Liquidity (matches/listing) Lead
  • Avg transaction size Op
  • Dispute rate Op
Services / Agency

Billable hours / projects

North star
Profit per project / FTE
  • Utilisation rate Lead
  • Realised vs quoted hours Lead
  • Repeat-client revenue Lead
  • Pipeline coverage Op
  • Time-to-invoice Op
FinTech / Lending

Credit · payments

North star
Risk-adjusted revenue
  • Approved-loan rate Lead
  • 30-day delinquency Lead
  • Avg loan size Lead
  • Cost of acquisition Op
  • NPS · borrower Op
Logistics

Delivery · 3PL

North star
On-time delivery rate
  • Route adherence Lead
  • Driver utilisation Lead
  • Damage-claim rate Lead
  • Cost per delivery Op
  • Customer reorder rate Op

12 tools. Pick the one that fits your stack.

We're tool-agnostic. We meet your data where it lives — Snowflake, BigQuery, Postgres — and ship the dashboard where your team will use it.

M
Metabase
open-source · self-host
L
Looker / Studio
Google stack
T
Tableau
enterprise · proven
P
Power BI
Microsoft stack
S
Snowflake
warehouse · core
B
BigQuery
warehouse · GCP
d
dbt
transform · models
F
Fivetran
connectors
A
Airbyte
open-source ELT
P
PostHog
product analytics
M
Mixpanel
event tracking
A
Amplitude
product analytics

Six artefacts. Board-ready, team-owned.

Not a 60-page strategy PDF. Six tight artefacts your team can act on this week. The dashboard is live in your tool, the playbook is in your Notion.

01 · KPI tree

1 north-star → 5 leads → 15 ops

The full hierarchy on one page. Each metric definitionally exact, with a formula, a data source, and a named owner. Editable by your team, versioned in Git.

Notion + 1-page PDF
02 · Metric definitions

Plain-English glossary

For every metric: what it is in English, the SQL behind it, the unit, the cadence, the threshold for "green", the owner. So everyone agrees what "active user" means.

YAML + Notion
03 · Live dashboard

Shipped in your tool

The executive view + 5 functional team views. Auto-refreshed from your warehouse. Embeddable in your intranet. Mobile-optimised.

Metabase · Looker · etc.
04 · Data model

dbt models · clean & tested

The transformation layer between raw sources and dashboards. Versioned, tested, documented. Your team owns and maintains it.

dbt project · GitHub
05 · Cadence playbook

How to actually run the rhythm

The weekly metric review meeting agenda. Monthly business review template. Quarterly board readout. So the dashboard is used, not just owned.

Notion templates
06 · Training + handover

Your team owns it from week 5

2-hour training session for exec + data leads. Markdown runbook for the top 10 issues (broken pipe, metric drift, etc.). 30 days of Sitect on-call.

Live + runbook

4 phases. Frame → Score → Build → Ship.

You'll spend ~10 hours across the engagement — most of it in week 1 (strategy workshop) and week 4 (training + readout). The middle two weeks we're building the data model and shipping the dashboard.

01
Week 1 · 4 hrs

Frame

Strategy interviews + workshop. North-star candidates listed, scored, picked. Leading + operational metrics drafted.

02
Week 2 · 1 hr

Score

Metric definitions written. Data sources mapped. Owner per metric assigned. Glossary signed off.

03
Week 3 · 2 hrs

Build

dbt models built & tested. Dashboard shipped in your tool. Stakeholder review of v1.

04
Week 4 · 3 hrs

Ship + train

Cadence playbook handed over. 2-hr training for exec + data leads. Board readout delivered. 30-day on-call begins.

The numbers behind a KPI framework that's actually used.

Aggregated across our deployed scorecards. Your numbers will be yours — these are the order-of-magnitude bracket.

−72%
Decision time
Median reduction in time from "we should look at this" to "we acted on it."
1
Source of truth
No more "your number disagrees with my number." One canonical figure per metric.
+38%
Meeting density
Decisions made per meeting — when everyone sees the same numbers.
Dashboard usage
Median weekly active-user lift on the new dashboard vs the old one nobody opened.

Pick the depth. We deliver in 3–6 weeks.

Fee fixed in writing. The dashboard lives in your tool, the data lives in your warehouse, the playbook lives in your Notion. You own everything from day one.

Framework only

Strategy + KPI tree

R8,000
/project · ex 15% VAT
  • 1 north-star + 5 leads + 10 ops
  • Strategy interviews + workshop
  • Metric definitions + glossary
  • Owner per metric
  • Cadence playbook draft
Choose Framework →
Embedded

Framework + warehouse setup

R72,000+
+ optional fractional CDO retainer · ex VAT
  • Everything in Full
  • Warehouse setup (Snowflake/BigQuery)
  • Up to 8 source connectors
  • Fivetran / Airbyte / dbt deployed
  • 90-day post-launch tuning
  • Optional fractional CDO (from R18k/mo)
Talk to us →

Questions from CEOs & CFOs.

If yours isn't here, send us your last board pack — we'll come back with a written critique of your current metrics in 48h. No sales call.

What if we don't have clean data yet?
Common — about 40% of clients we engage have data-quality issues at start. We address it in three ways: (1) Source quality audit in week 1 — we tell you honestly which sources are usable today. (2) Pragmatic v1 — we ship the dashboard with what's clean, mark sections "coming in v1.5" where data needs work. (3) Foundation engagement option — if data is too thin, we can do a separate warehouse + ETL setup first. We'll be honest before signing.
How is this different from our BI consultant?
BI consultants typically build dashboards on whatever metrics you tell them to. We start the other way — strategy first, metrics second, dashboard third. About 70% of our engagement time is on the strategy + definitions; only 30% is on the dashboard build. That ordering changes the outcome dramatically. If your dashboards don't get used, you have a strategy problem, not a tool problem.
Can you work with our existing data team?
Yes — and we recommend it. We can engage in three modes: (1) Lead — we deliver end-to-end, your data team observes & learns. (2) Co-build — your engineers pair with ours, output is jointly owned. (3) Coach — your team builds, we provide weekly review + critique. The Embedded tier supports any of these modes.
What about real-time vs daily updates?
Most KPIs don't need real-time. We default to 30-min refresh for operational metrics and daily refresh for strategic metrics. True real-time (<5min) is usually a sign someone wants a video-game scoreboard, not a decision tool. We push back on real-time when we see it — it almost always lowers signal-to-noise.
POPIA — where will the data live?
In your tenant. Warehouses (Snowflake / BigQuery) deployed to your accounts. Dashboards in your hosted instance. Sitect engineers get time-bound read access during the engagement, signed off in the DPA. We don't extract any PII for our records. POPIA-compliant data residency on request (af-south-1 / eu-west-1 / Azure SA).
Will the team actually look at the dashboard?
That's why the cadence playbook is mandatory in the Full tier. Dashboards are useless without a rhythm of looking at them. We design the weekly metric review, monthly business review, quarterly board readout — and run the first one with you. The cadence is what creates the habit.
What if the north-star changes?
Healthy — businesses evolve. The framework explicitly supports versioning: every quarter, the leadership team revisits the candidates against the 5 tests. If a better north-star emerges, you swap. The metric history is preserved (so you can rebuild the old chart) but the team aligns on the new one. We offer a 6-month "framework refresh" engagement (R10k) for exactly this.
What's the smallest version of this?
If R8k is too much, we offer a 1-day north-star workshop (R 4k). One senior in your office for the day, runs the strategy workshop, leaves you with the KPI tree on a one-pager. You DIY the dashboard from there — or upgrade to the full engagement later. Most teams start with the workshop and decide within 90 days whether to scale up.

Send us your last board pack.
We'll send back the gaps.

Email us your most recent board pack or monthly KPI report. Within 48 hours one of our senior partners will come back with a written critique: which metrics are vanity, which are lagging, what's missing, and what your real north-star should probably be. No sales pitch.

You'll get back in 48h

  • Top 3 vanity metrics to kill
  • Top 3 missing metrics to add
  • Candidate north-star metric
  • Honest "is this fixable" call

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