Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Help organizational leaders sleep at night because they know what's
going on.
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Encourage specific actions in a timely manner.
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Highlight exceptions and provide alerts when problems occur.
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Communicate progress and success.
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Provide a common interface for interacting with and analyzing impor-
tant organizational data.
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These are general motivations. You will have specific motivations for each
data product you are involved with. Before letting the data speak or simply
reflecting the will of your audience, consider what is important to you.
Your Audience
Data products need to start with the audiences in mind. Who are the consum-
ers of the information? What do they already know? What are their experi-
ences and prejudices? As you design the data product, understanding the
audiences can help you craft a product that fits their needs and is something
they love to use.
The needs and perspectives of different audiences can vary wildly. Consider
the needs of a marketing analyst versus a chief marketing officer. A marketing
analyst wants to know the details of a specific marketing campaign. He wants
to know how results are calculated and the data sources that were used in a
report. His job is to understand the data deeply, and he enjoys exploring data
to find his own insights. Spoon-feeding him just the top-line results is likely to
frustrate this marketing analyst, causing him to disengage from the information.
In contrast, the chief marketing officer has a much narrower attention span
for diving into the data. The top-line results are exactly where she will want
to start. If everything meets her expectations, she may not want to know any-
thing more. However, the CMO's standards for the clarity and aesthetics of the
data presentation are likely to be much higher than the marketing analyst. She
spends her day looking at marketing campaigns that have a specific message
and a polished display of information.
Often there will be multiple audiences for a data product. In fact, delivering
the same report across different parts of the organization can offer the ben-
efit of getting people on the same page. However, a diverse set of audiences
complicates your efforts to communicate the data. The structure of a data
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