It didnāt 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 whoād 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 didnāt already know how to build. I...
19 days agoĀ ā¢Ā 4 min read
Hereās 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 isnāt their Tableau ability. The problem is almost always that theyāre optimizing for āimpressiveā when what viewers actually need...
26 days agoĀ ā¢Ā 5 min read
A couple weeks ago I sat down with Claude. I had no agenda, no client deliverable, no specific question to answer, no dashboard brief. I had a folder of CSV files about the city of Essen, Germany: population counts, birth and death records, physician data, business registrations, pharmacies, registered dogs. I had a lot of curiosity about what would happen if I handed them to an Claude and said, go. What followed genuinely surprised me. It was pretty eye-opening. The first thing Claude did...
about 1 month agoĀ ā¢Ā 4 min read
The best sessions I ever attended at Tableau Conference weren't product demos. They were people standing up and telling you what they built. It was the dashboard that caught a problem nobody had seen coming, the viz that changed how their company made decisions, the moment their work finally got taken seriously. Those sessions were incredibly motivating. Not because the visuals were fancy. Because I could see myself in the person on stage. Somewhere along the way, that changed. The Tableau...
about 1 month agoĀ ā¢Ā 2 min read
I've conducted over 2,000 interviews in my career. Candidates make the same mistakes every single time. Here are the 9 most common and how to avoid them. 1. Not understanding the role Read the job description. Actually read it. If the role excites you, that will come through. If it doesn't, that will too. Reach out to people already in the role. Ask what questions came up in their interview. Use that. Tailor your answers to show exactly why you're the right fit. 2. Not knowing what the...
about 2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Something small has been shifting in the way I talk, and once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Specifically, I have been noticing two words I say when I ask someone for something. And one pattern keeps coming up over and over. Things like: I need you to do this. I need you to be there. I need you to help me with that. It sounds completely normal. We all say it. Constantly. Without thinking. But lately I have been more conscious of what saying "need" is actually doing. When I say I need...
about 2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 2 min read
Last week, I wrote about starting therapy. So many of you replied with kind words, encouragement, and stories of your own. Some of the emails were short. Some were deeply personal. Every single one meant a lot to me. Thank you. Writing that newsletter felt uncomfortable in a way Iām not used to. I can teach Tableau for hours without thinking twice. I can coach, present, and share ideas with confidence. Writing honestly about myself like that felt very different. But Iām glad I did. And over...
2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
That is not a sentence I ever imagined I would be writing in my newsletter, but here we are. I have been reluctant to go to therapy and to ask for help for far too long. Not because I did not think it could help, but because my past experiences with counseling were mixed. During my marriage, we had struggles, just like every other couple. We did couples counseling, and it did not feel very effective. Looking back, I think a big part of that was simple: it is very hard for counseling to work...
2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 4 min read
One of the biggest frustrations I hear from analysts isnāt about Tableau. Itās about what happens after the dashboard is built. You spend hours designing something thoughtful.You check the calculations.You test the interactions. Then you show it to stakeholders. And the reaction isā¦ underwhelming. Sometimes people get lost in the first thirty seconds.Sometimes they focus on the wrong thing.Sometimes the conversation drifts away from the insight you were trying to highlight. None of that means...
2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 1 min read