Foreword

I've always thought good problem-solving has a certain sound—like that of a key turning in a lock, with a firm but smooth turn. And then there's this click and a soft ting. You can hear it, right? It has just the right balance of standing out but not making a fuss. You can hear it, but it's also understated.

As much as we would love to hear this sound more often, the locks that we encounter every day are not that simple. Executing a project successfully is not as common a phenomenon as it sounds. Doing business is tough. It always has been. And the more complex the operations, the tougher it gets. And it is tough because, sometimes, we make it so by connecting the dots in slightly different ways.

Dashboards give you a sense of the situation, or a scan of how everything went down, giving us a feedback loop to what happened and what resulted—which can help us make better decisions, every day, with visualized data on demand.

Whether you are a business owner, contributing to a business, or just someone trying to make a system work in your everyday life, having a dashboard is almost an intuitive, mental need of seeing a bunch of dots in front of us, and being able to connect them.

And so, being able to pull data easily and arrange it nicely on a table for everyone to see is an ability that has the power to change the entire process of doing work. Increasingly, we have been seeing how, similar to coding, interest in this particular skill has touched programmers, managers, designers, marketers, CXOs, and even just individuals buying groceries.

To me, the essence of this book lies in its attempt to democratize a skill that empowers people in a way that has never happened before, using technologies that anyone can access and build on. The reliability and power to create dashboards allows anyone to uncover insights, seek truth, and use intelligence to make better decisions. So, if you are someone who has been sitting on the sidelines, this book could be the perfect wingman to enter the playground with, and change the game.

Sumit Saurav