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. You generalize by listening to more people, not by guessing harder.