Definitions Are Infrastructure

31 Dec, 2025

Ask five teams what revenue was last month. You’ll get five numbers.

Marketing counts bookings. Finance counts recognised revenue. Sales counts closed-won pipeline. Ops counts invoices sent. The CEO’s dashboard shows something else — a blend no one can quite explain.

Each number is correct for its purpose. Collectively, they’re useless.

Take “active customer.” Simple enough — until you try to define it.

Is a customer active if they logged in this month? If they used a core feature? If they’re still paying, even if they haven’t touched the product in six months? What about a multi-seat enterprise account where three users are active and forty aren’t?

Marketing wants a broad definition — more actives means better retention metrics. Product wants a narrow one — engagement signals whether the product is working. Finance just wants consistency so they can forecast renewals.

Each team defined the term for their own needs, at different times, without reconciling. Nobody noticed until someone asked “What’s our active customer count?” — and got three answers in the same meeting.

The instinct is to blame data quality. Dirty data, missing fields, systems that don’t talk to each other. Throw an analyst at it. Build a better dashboard.

But the problem usually isn’t the data. It’s the definitions.

Definitions are infrastructure. They’re invisible until something breaks — and then everything breaks. Every meeting becomes a reconciliation exercise. “Wait, which revenue are we looking at?” The conversation loops back to what the numbers mean instead of moving forward to what to do about them.

When definitions are clear and owned, decisions accelerate. Everyone knows what “customer” means. Dashboards align. Forecasts become comparable. The CEO’s question — “how many customers did we add last quarter?” — has one answer.

The fix isn’t a data warehouse. It’s a decision.

Someone has to own each definition. For every metric that matters, you need one answer to three questions: What does it include? Where does the number live? Who can change it?

This sounds straightforward. It isn’t. Finance owns their revenue definition because the board sees it. Marketing owns theirs because their comp depends on it. Getting alignment means unpicking incentives, not just writing documentation.

And definitions drift. Someone adds a filter. A new product doesn’t fit the old categories. The document you wrote eighteen months ago quietly becomes fiction. Maintenance is ongoing — not a one-time project.

Start with one metric. Pick the one that causes the most confusion — usually revenue or customer count. Write down what it includes and excludes. Get the three people who care most to sign off. Put it somewhere everyone can find.

Then do the next one.

Connects to Library: Theory of Constraints