Every retailer claims to be “data-driven.”
It’s the safe line in every investor deck. The empty phrase thrown around at all-hands meetings. Yet ask a simple question; who actually owns your commerce data? and you’ll usually get blank stares, or a list of different departments pointing at each other.
That gap in ownership isn’t a small detail. It’s a structural issue. And if you’re serious about growth, it’s one you shouldn’t ignore.
The Void at the Centre
Commerce data doesn’t and never will live neatly in one system. It sprawls across spreadsheets, PLMs, ERPs, PIMs, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools, and finance ledgers. Each team touches it. Very rarely does a single team own any data entity (like product data) end-to-end.
The result?
Data completeness and quality slips through the cracks. For instance, Design teams think in terms of concepts, Development teams think in terms of BOMs and sampling rounds, Merch teams think in terms of style-colours, Ops teams think in terms of SKUs, marketing wants to tell stories around collections, finance hacks together margins, and Tech/Systems ends up as the reluctant gatekeeper of data flow between everything.
In most cases. Nobody’s accountable, so everybody suffers.
How the Org Chart Gets in the Way
Traditional org design reinforces these silos.
You’ve got teams organised vertically around their piece of the workflow and the KPIs determining success are rarely shared across functions. These are common, logical silos but make achieving single sources of truth for data even harder.
More often than not, you’ll find different teams reporting different figures for the same metric. The biggest flashpoint for this is in weekly trade meetings.
It results in endless debates over “the real number” in meetings, duplicate reports built in parallel, and decisions made off instinct because nobody trusts the data. Growth slows not because the business lacks information, but because no one is positioned to control it.
The Symptoms You Already See
You’ll know this problem when:
Trade meetings have little value because they become debates about whose number is right.
Reporting packs grow in size but shrink in value.
Talented people spend more time on lower-value reconciliation than high-value analysis and interpretation of data.
These aren’t isolated frustrations. They’re signals of a deeper structural fault: the org chart doesn’t recognise commerce data as something that needs cross-functional squads with clear ownership.
Moving Towards Accountability
The answer isn’t to create yet another department. But it does mean taking ownership seriously. Some brands embed a data stewardship function inside operations, recognising that data is as much infrastructure as logistics. Others create cross-functional squads with the mandate, and budget authority, to govern commerce data.
The exact model matters less than the principle: someone has to own it.
Someone has to wake up in the morning with the job of making sure data is accurate, accessible, and usable across the business. Without that, the void remains.
Why It Matters for Growth
Clear ownership of commerce data doesn’t just tidy up reporting. It changes the speed of the organisation. Campaigns launch faster when marketing isn’t waiting on product attributes. Inventory decisions improve when ops and finance trust the same view of stock. Expansion plans become realistic when data models can scale with new markets.
Growth isn’t only about product or market opportunity. It’s about how fast you can make decisions. And decision-making is only as good as the data that underpins it.
Closing
So, who owns your commerce data? If your answer is “a bit of everyone,” then the truth is it’s nobody. Until the org chart recognises that reality, you’ll keep losing speed to duplicated effort, mistrust, and second-guessing.
The brands that solve this aren’t just cleaning up spreadsheets. They’re building the foundations for growth. They’re not convincing themselves that a piece of technology will solve this alone, they are building the org model to go with it.