A data model is ok. But the best data teams on the planet understand their business' growth model. That's because a lot of the most powerful interactions in a business are very hard to capture and measure.
For example, does better customer support improve product retention? How would you measure that in your data warehouse? You could spend months trying to build all the right attribution into your data tables.
A much simpler alternative is to build a Metric Tree for your business. A simple chart showing your KPIs and the component metrics that drive them. It's a powerful and liberating way to model your metrics.
If your data team is not feeling that impactful, I encourage you to sit down with stakeholders and map out this tree. Start with the core KPIs and for each KPI decide the 3 biggest drivers that you believe influence it. Model them out and join them up in a tree. Whether KPIs are growing or not, you'll have a clear starting place to start debugging "why" the KPIs are moving and then you can move to understand what changes we need to make. This requires no new data infrastructure but will substantially improve your ability to find growth levers.
I've seen teams doing this in figma/miro/eraser, which is a great start but it doesn't allow you track the performance of the metrics within the tree, you need live data.
In Lightdash you can now build your metrics into trees. The new Lightdash Canvas, allows you build out that growth model but also to monitor it. In our beta testing, a lot of customers have started using their metric trees as their core dashboard, since they give a very quick overview of "how the business is doing" but also the "why". Try it out and I'd love to know what you think