Ops Playbooks Over BI Dashboards
Nancy Dong, CEO of Roster, on the rise of ops-centric tooling
This points to a product gap between seeing a metric move and knowing which team behavior to change. BI tools are usually built by analysts who are great at cleaning data and making dashboards, but they are not the sales ops leader deciding how a rep cohort should ramp, which calls matter, or which workflow step is breaking. Roster sits on top of warehouse and app data to turn raw activity logs into operational instructions.
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In practice, the raw inputs live across Salesforce, Gong, and Salesloft. Roster’s job is to stitch those events into one timeline of what reps and managers actually did, then map that behavior to outcomes like attainment, pipeline, and ramp time. That is much closer to a playbook engine than a dashboard.
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This is why the warehouse is conceptually important. The warehouse is the shared store of cleaned company data, and Roster is designed to both read from it and write back into it. That makes Roster part of the action layer on top of the modern data stack, adjacent to products like Census that push modeled data into operating tools.
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The competitive boundary with Looker and Tableau is not who owns charts. It is who owns the last mile from insight to process change. Traditional BI tells a CRO that the quarter is off track. An ops centric tool tries to show which new SDR class is off pace, which behaviors are missing, and what managers should fix this week.
The stack is moving toward systems that do not stop at reporting. As warehouses became the source of truth, the next layer became tools that push context back into daily work. The winners in ops software will be the products that can translate company specific process knowledge into repeatable recommendations, not just cleaner dashboards.