my director (in a very very big corpo) once rejected a dashboard because it wasn't "beautiful enough" = unprofessional. nobody knew what that meant. all team spent more time on colors & arrowws than on data analysis
had one of those moments this week
sales pulled a number for “active customers”
finance had a different one
and of course… the dashboard showed a third version
all coming from the same warehouse btw.
wrong data, you will think? nope!
turns out:
- sales defines “active” as anyone who purchased in the last 90 days
- finance uses 12 months
- product counts anyone who logged in
and this is the part that really gets me - we spend so much time fixing pipelines, optimizing queries, building cleaner dashboards
but almost no time aligning on what the numbers actually mean
feels like tools aren’t the bottleneck anymore, and with AI coming to data analysis this just will end up in huge fights for data
how others deal with this - do you formalize metric definitions somewhere?
spent 3 days on my first report when i just joined analyst team. manager opened it, looked for maybe 20 seconds, asked why numbers don't match his Excel.
didn't know what to do honestly. i went to the sales team the next day and sat with them for a bit. when they were planning sales
turns out they didn't understand half of what I built. like genuinely didn't know what they were looking at. all they needed was two numbers - how much left the factory, how much is sitting at the distributor.
I made them a cockpit they didnt know how to use!
still think about this when someone tells me their dashboard isn't being used.
its so classic, first i felt terrified and ashamed, but now - now im just making a poker face and say - my numbers are correct