From Project to Purpose – How One Story Transformed Our Data Modernization Journey
- Dave Findlay
- Jul 9
- 3 min read
When you’re deep in the weeds of a technical project, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
You’re sorting through legacy code, cleaning up mappings, rewriting stored procedures, and solving problem after problem. It’s important work, no question, but it can start to feel abstract.
Detached.
Like you’re solving puzzles in isolation.
That’s exactly where my team and I found ourselves during a recent data modernization project.
We were tasked with moving a major enterprise off a legacy data platform and onto a modern, cloud-based stack. The system we were replacing had been in place for nearly 20 years. It was a patchwork of overlapping reports, hand-coded ETLs, and tightly coupled logic that had grown alongside the business in all the worst ways. Our job was to unravel it, salvage what still worked, and build something scalable and future-ready.
If you looked at our project plan, you’d see all the usual suspects:
✅ Migrate reports
✅ Rebuild pipelines
✅ Clean up technical debt
✅ Improve performance
✅ Reduce cost
✅ Unlock new use cases
All of it was true. All of it was necessary.
But none of it felt particularly inspiring.
And that’s how the work was going. It was technically solid, but emotionally flat.
The team was grinding through the backlog, hitting targets, solving blockers. But something was missing. The work lacked emotional texture. It was just work.
Until one meeting changed everything.
A Story from the Field
It was the first time we were given the go-ahead to engage directly with the business.
(As a rule, I prefer to start with the business and work back to the technology. But this was a politically sensitive environment, and business users had been kept at a distance early on.)
Our first conversation was with the VP of Sales, and within minutes, everything shifted.
She didn’t start with requirements. She told us a story.
The night before, she was picking up her daughter from dance class. Around 7 PM, her sales dashboards finally refreshed — late, as usual.
She noticed an odd dip in revenue.
At the same time, she got an email from the CEO asking for more detail.
So there she was, parked outside the studio, laptop open, firing off emails to her regional directors. Some were finishing their day. Others were getting ready for bed.
After nearly an hour, they traced the issue to a store closure that hadn’t been properly reported.
The root problem? The data loads were just too slow.
Not broken. Not unreliable. Just too delayed to support how the business operated today.
Because of that lag, sales leaders were stuck chasing down answers after hours, instead of handling issues during the workday.
That story hit home.
Suddenly, our work wasn’t just about faster queries or cheaper infrastructure.
It was about making sure someone didn’t have to work from a parking lot.
It was about giving people their evenings back.
It was about letting leaders focus on running their teams instead of tracking down anomalies at night.
That became our “why.”
When You Know the Why, the Work Changes
After that meeting, the energy in our team changed.
We weren’t just building a platform.
We were creating peace of mind.
We were enabling focus.
We were giving people space to do their jobs well and then go home and be present.
Once a team sees that connection between their effort and a real human outcome, everything improves.
The code gets better. The testing gets tighter. The collaboration gets stronger. Because it matters more.
Technical work is never just technical.
It always touches someone’s day, their schedule, their stress levels, their ability to do great work.
Find that person. Hear their story. Share it with your team.
Because when you understand the why behind the work, the project becomes a mission.
And that’s when great things happen.
At Fuse, we believe a great data strategy only matters if it leads to action.
If you’re ready to move from planning to execution — and build solutions your team will actually use — let’s talk.
