Executive
Dashboard
Get the data to the executives, without handing them the platform.
A major global retailer needed social data in front of their managers and C-level executives, people who had neither the training nor the need to navigate raw Enterprise. Their analysts were stuck hand-building reports for everyone above them.
One simple place, curated by the analyst.
Managers and execs get one place to view the data an analyst chose to surface. No analyst intervention for every request, and no non-analyst ever forced to learn the full platform. The analyst curates. Everyone else just reads.
Stop hand-building reports for the teams above you.
Digest the numbers quickly and regularly, no platform required.
It started smaller than it ended.
The original idea was modest: email a snapshot of a saved search or topic, and nothing more. But as I kept working with the client who’d requested it, a better shape emerged, a live page where non-analyst users could see the curated data directly. That gave the data more visibility and gave users flexibility in how they consumed it.
Emailed snapshot
A saved search or topic, pushed to an inbox. Simple, but one-directional and static.
Live dashboard
A curated page execs could open any time, more visibility, more flexibility.
Live dashboard, or static report?
One real tension ran through the team: should this be a live dashboard, like our Pulse product, or a static, refreshable report? Opinions differed. I made the call for a live dashboard because it fit the actual use case our major client had described better than a static page would.
Built for one retailer. Had to ship for everyone.
We were designing this for one specific client, but it had to ship as a general feature. So the working assumption, that what solved their need would translate to other customers, needed constant checking.
I de-risked it by showing the in-progress design to other clients, who liked it and fed additional requirements back in. Designing a single-customer feature so it serves many is genuinely tricky. The clean lesson was to widen the circle of feedback early, rather than generalizing in a vacuum.
A C-level executive with little subject-matter knowledge who just needs to digest the data quickly and regularly, the person the whole feature had to serve.
A one-customer feature is a many-customer feature in disguise.
Widen the circle of feedback while it’s still in progress. Showing it in progress is what caught the requirements I would have missed.