Hey Reader A lot of analysts tell me a version of this: “I really want to join Next‑Level Tableau, but I’m not sure my manager will pay for it.” Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your manager’s job is to help you grow and perform better. Your job is to make it easy for them to say “yes.” And in this situation, the actual worst‑case is: You ask They say “no” Your life stays exactly the same Same skills, same dashboards, same promotion odds. Best case? They say “yes” Your company pays You get...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader Dashboards don’t get you promoted. Stories about business impact do. Here’s a simple exercise for one dashboard you shipped in the last 90 days: Write the “before” in 2 sentences. What was confusing, slow, or broken? Who was frustrated? Write the “after.” What decision is now faster or clearer? Who benefits, and how often? Quantify something. Minutes saved per week Fewer errors Faster reporting cycle Package it into a 60‑second story. “We used to spend X hours each month pulling...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader If your line charts look messy, it’s usually not the data. It’s the design. Quick 3‑minute clean‑up checklist: Kill the cluttered gridlines. Keep either light horizontal gridlines or none. Almost never need vertical ones. Tame the colors. Max 3 series per chart. Use one strong accent color for the hero line, neutral for context lines. Label smarter, not harder. Turn off every point label. Only label the last point of each line on the right-hand side. Smooth the time axis. Use...
25 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader Most dashboards fail for one simple reason: They try to answer 9 questions at once and end up answering none. This week, pick one dashboard and do this: Write the primary question in plain English.“How are sales trending vs target this quarter?” Turn that into your dashboard title.In Tableau: rename the sheet or dashboard title to the literal question. No clever names. Demote everything that isn’t helping answer that question.• Secondary charts go to a “Details” zone or a separate...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
According to Fortune, AI spending is set to hit $500 billion this year. Training budgets are shrinking at the same time. That is not a coincidence. That is a decision. The same reporting found that nearly three out of four knowledge workers are already using AI at work, and more than half of them have never been formally trained to use it well. Companies bought the tool and skipped the person. They are betting that the software will do the job the training used to do. Here is the part that...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
I’ve had coaches my entire life. Baseball. Basketball. Football. You name it, I’ve had a coach for it. I even have a running coach now. For years, I didn’t think much about why. That’s just what athletes do. You find someone who knows the game better than you, and you let them help you get somewhere you couldn’t reach alone. Then I started a business. And I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. (Most days, I still don’t.) But somewhere in building Next-Level Tableau, I started...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Jason runs a team of eight analysts. They all have Tableau access. They all attend the same meetings. They all know how to build a bar chart. And yet, every quarter, leadership asks the same question: why does the data never seem to drive the decision? Jason knows the dashboards are there. He knows the team is working hard. What he cannot figure out is why the investment isn’t delivering what it promised. Buying Tableau was the easy part. Getting a return on is where teams stall. The...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A few weeks ago I was chatting with an analyst who had just been promoted. She is sharp. Genuinely one of the best I have seen at her level. And her frustration is hard to explain without sounding ungrateful. “I haven’t learned anything new in eight months,” she said. “Not because I don’t want to. Because every time I carve out space, something lands on my desk that only I can handle.” That last part is what caught my attention. “Only I can handle.” That sounds like a compliment. And it is....
2 months ago • 3 min read
This is part two of a two-part story. If you missed part one, you can read it here. Something had shifted in Houston. I didn’t resign the next day. I didn’t tell anyone. I just carried it with me through the rest of the Ironman and the flight home, turning it over quietly. Over the summer, while I was on sabbatical after Annika was born, Eva and I kept coming back to the same question. If not now, when? I joined Dan Martell’s coaching program. I started getting serious about what building my...
2 months ago • 3 min read