There's a version of this problem that teams talk about all the time: we need faster dashboards, quicker reports, real-time analytics. And it makes sense. When something breaks, you want to know sooner.
But here's what becomes clear after watching teams try to solve this for years: faster doesn't fix it. A quicker look at the past is still a look at the past. You're just finding out what went wrong with less delay. The customer is still gone. The opportunity still closed. You're just aware of it sooner.
The real issue isn't speed. It's direction.
Most of the data teams rely on is pointed backward. It tells you what happened. What someone did. Where they dropped off. It's a recording of an experience that's already over. And that's useful for trend-spotting and quarterly reviews, but it doesn't help you when someone is stuck right now, trying to finish something and failing.
That's the gap that keeps showing up. Not a lack of data. A lack of presence.
What actually changes things
When teams can see behavior as it's happening, the work shifts in ways that are hard to appreciate until you've experienced it. Support stops starting every conversation with "can you tell me what happened?" Product stops waiting weeks for patterns to emerge before fixing obvious friction. Marketing stops guessing at intent based on what someone did three days ago.
It's not magic. It's just being in the room while things are still unfolding, instead of showing up after everyone's left and trying to reconstruct the scene.
Most tools aren't built for this. Most workflows aren't either. So teams default to what they have: retroactive data, educated guesses, and a lot of back-and-forth that frustrates everyone involved.
The window is smaller than people think
Online, patience barely exists. Someone tries once, maybe twice, and if it doesn't work, they're gone. No complaint. No feedback. Just a silent exit and a row in a database that no one will look at until it's aggregated into a chart next month.
When you can only work from what already happened, you're always one step behind the people you're trying to help. But when you can see what's unfolding in real time, you get a shot at actually changing the outcome.
That's the shift worth paying attention to. Not faster data. Present data.
