You get a dashboard, you get a dashboard, you get a dashboard! Suddenly, dashboards were everywhere. Engineer wants some data for an ad-hoc analysis? Here’s a dashboard. The VP has a presentation next week and wants some charts? She gets a dashboard. And no, they never looked at them again. The one-size-fits-all approach was draining our team’s time, resources, and motivation. It is a uniquely demoralizing feeling watching yet another one of your dashboards get ditched faster than your Myspace account in 2008. (View Highlight)
Death by 1,000 filters: After a dashboard had gone live, we were immediately flooded with requests for new views, filters, fields, pages, everything (remind me to tell you about the time I saw a 67-page dashboard…#haunting). It was clear that the dashboards were not answering everyone’s questions, which was either a failure of the dashboard design step or a failure in other tools to provide the answers people needed. What’s worse, is we found out that people were using all these filters to export the data to Excel and do their own thing with it anyway 🤦♀️. (View Highlight)
Fundamentally, notebooks offer the opportunity:
for everyone to trust the process (because they can literally see the code and the author’s commentary),
to have the power and flexibility to answer any question (so long as the user knows the language in which the tool is written), and
a way to collaborate on, present, and share these decisions with a wider audience. (View Highlight)
