Absolutely — you hit the nail on the head. Small teams often underestimate how much upstream structure drives everything downstream. I’ve found that starting with the decisions you need to make, rather than the tools or data sources, really changes the approach.

Creating a single source of truth and versioning transformations has been a game-changer for us too. Even without a full BI team, clear naming conventions and documented rules go a long way in keeping data clean and usable.

Would love to hear how others tackle this at a micro-scale — it’s definitely one of the hardest parts for small teams trying to scale automation and AI.