Prologue
In my first job, one of my primary responsibilities was manually filling out an Excel sheet that powered a rudimentary dashboard with the most important KPIs. The dashboard was shown at the standup, which meant arriving early at the office every morning. Back then, I had little to no experience with data. But I was going to do anything in my power to sleep 15 minutes longer.
My plan was to find the right dashboarding tool and learn how to automate this report. That was when I came across Tableau. Very quickly, manually refreshing dashboards became a thing of the past. Honestly, I had a lot of fun building dashboards and torturing the data for insights.
One day, a top-level manager passed by my desk on his way to a meeting. When he noticed I was building a dashboard, he approached me and asked: “Are these the results of the latest campaign?”. I nodded. He grabbed a chair, sat next to me, and proceeded to ask me multiple follow-up questions. I will never...