By Chris Burgess

What I Got Wrong About Executive Visibility

When I started exploring the idea that became Intuifi, I spoke to founders and executives before I built anything.

The initial drive behind those conversations was to understand how they were dealing with customer feedback. I wanted to know how information was collected, how it moved through a company and where it broke down.

Those conversations shaped my initial view of the problem. I kept hearing about information being spread across different tools and teams, and about how much of it was selected or interpreted before reaching the people making decisions.

That led me towards the idea of giving leaders a clearer view of the evidence across the business.

Then I built Intuifi and showed it to Lee Tedstone, CEO of Kobai.

That conversation changed where I thought the product could go.

The problem with the filtered summary

Getting a clear read on the business becomes harder when different teams are working from different systems and different views of the same problem.

For example, Sales might be looking at a CRM that shows the revenue attached to a customer request. Engineering might be looking at a sprint board that shows the work required to deliver it and what would need to be delayed as a result.

When Sales escalates a custom feature as critical to the quarter and Engineering warns that delivering it will create technical debt or displace more important work, you are left with two credible claims. The difficulty is that those arguments may be supported by different sets of evidence. Each team has part of the picture, but it can be difficult to see how those pieces fit together.

You are left connecting them yourself or relying on someone else to reconcile the separate accounts.

That became particularly clear when I spoke to Lee. A significant part of Kobai's 2026 plan depended on one person's understanding of the backlog. Lee did not necessarily distrust that interpretation. The problem was that he had no easy way to test it against the underlying evidence himself.

As he explained:

"A significant part of our 2026 business plan depended on one person's understanding of the backlog. I did not have a clear enough view of the underlying evidence to test that perspective properly. If we get that view wrong, we risk prioritising the wrong work. That can mean disappointing existing customers, delaying important improvements or making commitments to new customers that we cannot deliver."

Moving beyond the summary

That made something click for me. Executive visibility was not only about bringing more information together. It could also mean giving leaders a way to test the conclusions they were already receiving.

Intuifi did not need to replace departmental reporting. It could give leaders a way to move beyond the summary when they needed to understand what supported it.

Intuifi can work with information already held across the business. You can start with a single source that matters to you, or bring together material from several sources when a broader view would be useful. It identifies themes within that information and keeps each finding connected to the records that support it.

That means a leader can start with the summary, then inspect the detail behind it when they need to challenge an assumption, understand how a conclusion was reached or see whether the evidence supports the way an issue has been presented.

It gives them another view of what is appearing in the underlying information, rather than leaving them dependent on the summary alone.

Lee described the value of that approach like this:

"Intuifi gives me the summary first, then lets me drill into the detail behind it. I can understand the recommendation quickly and still go as deep as I need to check that it is supported by the evidence."

A shared basis for the discussion

Giving a CEO access to the evidence is not about micromanaging. Teams can and should continue making decisions within their own areas.

The value is that when different interpretations need to be discussed, people can work from a shared evidence base.

That gives them something concrete to inspect, challenge and compare. Sales can still bring its commercial perspective. Engineering can still bring its understanding of delivery effort and technical trade-offs. But the discussion can be grounded in the evidence behind each view, rather than only in the way each case has been presented.

For me, that was the important shift.

I had assumed better executive visibility meant giving the person at the top a clearer picture of what was happening. What I learned was that the picture was only part of the problem. Leaders also needed a way to understand what sat underneath it when the decision mattered.

Testing whether the analysis stands up

You do not have to take that on trust.

A practical way to test Intuifi is to start with data someone on your team already understands well. Ask them to run information they have already analysed manually through Intuifi, then compare the findings with their own view and inspect the evidence behind them.

That is how Katy Parkhill, Head of Engineering at Kobai, first tested the platform.

"When I first joined the company, I needed to go through the entire backlog of over 400 tickets to decide what mattered and what didn't. The themes Intuifi found matched very closely with my own analysis, work that had taken almost six weeks was done in five minutes."

If the findings closely match the work of someone who knows the data well, you can judge for yourself how useful that connection between the summary and the underlying evidence could be elsewhere in the business.