Build Your Dashboard Branding & Your Minimum Viable Data.
JJ Reynolds of Vision Labs and Ethan Aaron of Portable give you the tell-all on effective dashboard building. About Ethan Aaron & Portable Ethan started his data journey at a small startup building dashboards taking data from a read replica of a database and building charts to run the business. When they got acquired by Live Ramp Ethan asked himself why they didn’t have a data team so he wrote his job description to become the head of business intelligence or head of analytics at Live Ramp. He then worked in corp Dev and M&A in the data world before starting Portable four years ago. When you look around at all the data integration tools, the people who pull data from applications and systems and put it in data warehouses all have the same 200 Integrations. The problem is if you want data from other tools or if you want one tool that has all the Integrations it doesn’t exist so Portable set out to focus on how you build 10,000 Integrations. Currently, they’re at about 1,300 with a path to get to 10,000. Portable is an ELT tool, that extracts data from business applications and puts it in data warehouses either for systems that you can’t find a connector to anywhere else on the market or for more common systems like Clavo, Pendo HubSpot Etc. For those, it’s typically a support reliability or cost consideration that drives someone to Portable over other Solutions. About JJ & Vision Labs I’m JJ Reynolds founder of Vision Labs we’re a marketing data agency. We work with teams to integrate data from various sources and build up reporting that makes sense. We’re known for building dashboards that make sense to everybody involved. People come to us and refer us when they need to make their reports super actionable for their teams. Minimum Viable Dashboard 95% of the reports that we see out there have too many numbers on them and no one knows what to do with the numbers. The goal is Simplicity, if you can simplify your dashboard it becomes much easier to act. “I would have made it simpler but I didn’t have enough time” I would have made it simpler but I did not have enough time is something that keeps happening so basically what we want to do is remove everything except for the action as much as possible. At Vision Labs, we serve as a measurement Department as we manage all these our clients. We work in the Google stack mostly Big Query and Looker Studio on the marketing acquisition side of things. If you have questions click here. Why does your dashboard end up like this? Where you have a lot of data a lot of numbers and no one knows what to do with it. It comes down to the data person being unable to put themselves into the shoes of a marketing person, an HR leader, a sales leader or a CEO and think about what they care about. You have to figure out how to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they care about every day. You can’t think about the narrative through your perspective as a data person you have to think about the narrative through the lens of the business person who is going to do something something with the the information. That is the most important thing of all of this is don’t think about it as a data deliverable think about what are you going to do with the data what are the things that you’re doing next and make it super clear what those are. That’s the challenge. In general, there’s no action and no one knows what to do with that data. Often people are just checking boxes, we have this report because we have to have this report. At the core of it, there’s too much data, there’s too many numbers and too many things that don’t matter. The Big Problem The big problem is the complexity to time ratio. At the core of it is that over time creating dashboards and getting data has become easier, and at the same time the volume of data is increasing, we’ve got more ad platforms we’ve got more internal servers. Over time what happens is that the readability of your dashboard just goes off the chart in terms of complexity. The goal here is to take this red line and make our readability easier and that will in turn make it easier to take action. The easiest way to combat this is going to be following this little framework that we use. MVD Framework If you apply this Minimal Viable Dashboard Framework every time someone asks a question of you it will make your life way easier. 1 – What Is Important? START with 1 Metric. Choose one metric that you think is important, don’t use Revenue because revenue is always important. It could be uptime, it could be new leads, it could be the number of page views. How do you talk to business stakeholders about a metric? How do you get to a metric when you’re talking to business stakeholders? We have something we call the Foresight System It’s a dumbbell approach where on one side is the bottom metric, like revenue or profit if you want to get spicy, and on the other side you have Impressions and we do start at a metric and then see what things influence it and at what granularity do we need to know that. We work to dissect what their thought process is when they see a number and then we try to put that onto a report so that they can see the influence levers and how they affect that bottom number. Before you even get started thinking of a specific metric as the problem you need a high-level view of your entire funnel. For me to know what matters I first need to