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...
8 days 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....
15 days 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...
22 days ago • 3 min read
For years, I helped build something I was genuinely proud of. The Data School trained some of the best Tableau consultants in the world. We had cohorts in London, New York, and Hamburg. Hundreds of analysts came through the program and went on to do incredible work. And I loved it. Until I didn’t. When we decided to scale, the right move was to let the other coaches take on more of the training. It was great for their careers and great for the business. But it meant I was doing less of the...
29 days ago • 2 min read
There is a version of you that people talk about before you walk into the meeting. Your name comes up when leadership needs someone they can trust with the important work. Your dashboards don't just get opened. They get used. Decisions get made because of what you built. Your reputation precedes you in rooms you haven't been in yet. That version of you is closer than you think. But it doesn't come from getting better at Tableau. It comes from being impossible to overlook. The analysts I have...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
When I started The Data School, I wasn’t hiring analysts. I was hiring people who had never worked in data a day in their lives. My job was to take them from zero and turn them into Tableau experts in four months. No shortcuts. No skipping the hard parts. Just intensive, deliberate teaching, repeated until it clicked. Ten of those students became Tableau Visionaries. More than twenty-five became Tableau Ambassadors. I tell you this not to brag. I tell you this because it changed how I think...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I have a bad neck. Not "I sleep a little stiff sometimes" bad. Full-on, wakes-me-up-at-3am, chiropractor-on-speed-dial bad. So when I started looking at pillows and found one for $230, I did what any reasonable person does. I called Eva to ask if I was losing my mind. She didn't say yes. She said: "Andy, how much did your last pair of running shoes cost?" (You don't want to know. 😊) I told her. She said: "And how many hours do they last?" I went quiet. Then she said: "You sleep eight hours a...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
It didn’t happen overnight. That would have been easier to recognize. It started slowly, the way these things usually do. The Data School was expanding. I was handing off more teaching to people who’d earned the right to do it. My role was shifting. I was more involved in leadership, less on building my skills. More management, less Tableau. I told myself that was progress. And in some ways it was. But somewhere along the way, I stopped building things I didn’t already know how to build. I...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Here’s something I see happen all the time in Tableau: An analyst spends hours building a dashboard.They want it to look sophisticated and impressive. And instead of just showing what the data means, they reach for something complex: loads of filters, charts packed together, color everywhere. And they wonder why nobody actually uses it. Most of the time, the issue isn’t their Tableau ability. The problem is almost always that they’re optimizing for “impressive” when what viewers actually need...
2 months ago • 5 min read