Data Is Capital · Companion volume
Behind the Scenes
Eleven twenty-minute questions about the data budget — and what each answer cost.
In What Data Really Costs, a CEO spends four years funding a data team she cannot account for. This is the notebook she kept while she fixed it. Sixteen entries. Her own arguments with herself, and the numbers she was afraid were right.
Paperback. Also sold beside the fable it belongs to.
What Data Really Costs
Behind the Scenes
Eleven twenty-minute questions about the data budget
Lior Barak
What this is
Not a summary of the story. The working notes underneath it.
The fable shows you what happened. This shows you what it felt like to be the one deciding — written in the middle of it, before anyone knew whether it was going to work.
Every entry carries the objections she never resolved, still marked open. The works council that would not sign off on measuring anybody's week. The engineer who called it surveillance and was not entirely wrong. The eighty percent of the portfolio she cut, which moved the team's health score by four tenths of a point and taught her more than the cut itself.
There is no methodology chapter. The eleven questions are simply the ones she found herself asking, in the order she found them, with the cost of each answer written underneath.
The eleven questions
Each one goes to a single person who works for you.
None of them takes longer than the walk to their desk and the twenty minutes after it. None of them needs you to build anything, learn anything, or announce anything first. They are printed here in full — take them and use them whether or not you ever buy the book.
- 01
What decision does this enable, what does saying yes cost, and what comes off the list?
- 02
How much of last week was on the plan Monday morning?
- 03
What does this product cost to keep alive, beyond the invoice?
- 04
How many hours a week does your team spend getting data ready to use?
- 05
What share of the people it was built for opened it in the last thirty days?
- 06
After the week takes its share, how much can you actually commission?
- 07
Why does the business need this number, and what decision does it trigger?
- 08
What reading would make you stop?
- 09
How did last month split across building, launching, and keeping the lights on?
- 10
What does doing nothing cost a month, and when does building it break even?
- 11
Which of the four warning signs are true right now?
What each answer cost
The questions are free. The answers were not.
38%
of the week was on the plan
The first reading. The other sixty-two percent had no label, no ticket type, and never reached the CFO as a cost.
312
products to keep alive
The only layer anyone had ever counted, because it was the only layer with a screen attached to it.
80%
of the portfolio cut
It moved the team's health score four tenths of a point. Entry nine is about why, and it is the most useful page in the book.
Reads beside
What Data Really Costs
The fable is the story: three data leaders in four years, a €400K incident, and a CEO who finally stopped paying for something she did not own. The notebook is what she was writing while it happened. Either one works alone. Together they are the same four years from the inside and the outside.
Before you buy
Three fair questions
- Do I need to read What Data Really Costs first?
- No. The eleven questions work on their own, and most of the notebook is a CEO arguing with herself about numbers you will recognise from your own company. It lands harder if you have read the fable, because you know what it cost her to ask each one.
- Is this a workbook?
- No. It is a notebook, written in the middle of the thing, while the outcome was still unknown. Sixteen entries, each with the pushbacks she never resolved left on the page. There are no blanks to fill in and no exercises to complete.
- Who is it actually for?
- A founder or executive who keeps approving a data budget they cannot account for, and the senior person inside the data team who has been trying to explain why. Both read the same eleven questions and arrive at the same conversation from opposite sides.
How much of last week did your data team spend on the plan you agreed on Monday?
That is question two. It takes twenty minutes and one conversation. If you do not know the answer, the other ten are in the notebook.