Metric drift rarely arrives as a crisis. It arrives as small incompatibilities: one team uses gross, another uses net, a third mixes reporting dates, and the executive layer never sees the mismatch until a monthly review stalls.
The cleanest programs do not try to solve this with more meetings. They solve it with stronger defaults:
- one definition per executive metric
- one owner per definition
- one place to inspect lineage
- one change process for approved edits
That structure gives the data team fewer surprise requests and gives the business fewer debates about whose number is right.
The platform can help
Snowflake and Tableau do not solve governance on their own, but they can make the right behaviour easier to repeat when lineage, ownership, and review cadence are designed together.
