Telling Stories With Data

I have been thinking about dashboards a lot recently – maybe I have been perusing the Euros 2020 app a bit too much (the data they hold about matches and players is fascinating). The key to a good dashboard is how fast somebody looking at it can pick up the underlying message – it isn’t [...]

How can data make Product Managers more awesome?

The role of a product manager isn’t easy. We have to deliver a great customer experience, a great user experience (they’re not always the same!) and make money. Ideally, lots of money. That money might be made immediately and quickly, or it might come at some point in the future, but ultimately, the product needs [...]

5 things a dashboard should be (and 5 it really shouldn’t)

At Data Monsters we talk about Dashboards a lot. You probably hear them mentioned in business (and technical) conversations at work. Often it’s slipped into a sentence “We need that in a dashboard” or “Can we set up a weekly dashboard for the sales results?”. Many people use the term Dashboard to mean any display [...]

5 Reasons Why Big Data Projects Fail – Insight for Data Engineers

I have worked on data projects in many different environments for over a decade. None have been perfect. Issues I have seen range from cubes that take 12 hours to refresh at the end of every month, to business requirements changing so much that the data warehouse was scrapped before it was complete (and sometimes, [...]

Definition of a Data Monster

We decided to set up Data Monsters after a visit to SQLBits in April 2017. It’s one of the friendliest conferences out there, it’s informative, in-depth and fun. But it’s missing the Data Monsters. So what’s a Data Monster? For us, a Data Monster isn’t a SQL brain or a data scientist or a programmer. [...]