The Challenge
Sustainable growth requires reliable data, and different departments were working off fragmented sources with no single source of truth.
What BI tools did we actually need, and who should own them?
Solution & Process
After weighing Tableau against Power BI, we chose Tableau — we weren’t Microsoft-stack-heavy, which is where Power BI has the edge. Marketing was the first department to build out dashboards, since I felt the urgency most directly.
I handed business requirements to the data team to build Tableau data marts and dashboards, iterating until they matched what marketing actually needed. In parallel, I used Metabase (on the same data marts, via SQL/BigQuery) for dashboards I could build and modify myself, and Google Data Studio (via Supermetrics) to unify Google Ads and Meta Ads spend with internal marketing cost in one view.
Benefit & outcome
Analysis Turnaround
Performance-trend analysis went from a multi-day task to a same-day one.
Decision Cycles
Centralized, self-serve dashboards let teams act on data instead of waiting for reports.
IT Dependency
Fewer ad-hoc reporting requests routed through engineering, freeing up their time.
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Book a free 20-minute consult — I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help, and how.