Don't let your stakeholders get lost in the data. This is where Simplyput Shines When it matters, your dashboard won't be found

The one thing I can't stress enough to data teams is that your stakeholders:

  1. Don't remember where that dashboard is
  2. Don't remember that it existed (if they haven't seen it in 10 days)
  3. Don't know how to find it even after they are told it exists

And before you pull out the stats of your dashboard, remember you are only counting the people that found it. You are not counting the people that needed it but never found it.

I remember all the meetings, Confluence pages, and custom dashboards, video tutorials, trainings made to show how we are here to help them get their data questions answered. If they can't find it after that, it's really on them, right?!?

But maybe we are thinking about this wrong. And by wrong I mean disastrously wrong…

The moment when a data question is formed in someone's head it's not magically appearing out of thin air. It exists in a context of something else that is going on. And that context is big (a lot bigger than we might think).

For example their minds are deep within the details of Google Ads and how the algorithm has changed in a slightly different way based on a post about a month ago from this expert that only posts gold, and while the team had tried many different optimizations the subcontracted firm had just hired a new account manager, and you remembered they had their kick off meeting two weeks ago with our tech team who all thought this endeavor was useless, and now wouldn't be great to finally show that the attribution model will show it's value…..

Tell me do you think this person knows where that dashboard is you made them 2 weeks ago? And how to use it? That it even could answer the simple question "how does the change in Google Ads campaigns correlate with lead score change?" The answer is NO they won't find it.

Other business units have a lot of context to manage and making them all keep an inventory in their head of where to go to get questions answered simply doesn't stick. It churns good talent and leaves a lot of useful answers left on the table.

SimplyPut there is a better way.

Tony loves the fascinating world of data. From the how to represent reality in bytes, to how to convey stories in data visualizations.