Data Products

A dashboard is a static or semi-interactive view of metrics for people to look at; a data product is a reusable asset (like an embedded analytics feature, an automated alert system, or a recommendation feed) that actively drives or automates a decision. Most companies start with dashboards and only need true data products once they want to act on data automatically rather than just view it.

The tool is rarely the bottleneck. Most dashboard problems trace back to inconsistent underlying data models rather than the BI tool itself, so switching tools without fixing the data layer usually reproduces the same problems. We typically focus on fixing the modeling layer feeding your existing BI tool rather than recommending a tool switch.

Yes, embedded analytics (using tools like Looker Studio, or custom-built dashboards via API) is a common data product we build for SaaS companies who want to expose insights directly inside their own application. This is typically its own engagement scoped separately from internal BI, since the reliability and design bar for customer-facing analytics is higher.

We start by identifying the 3-5 decisions your team actually needs to make weekly, then work backward to the metrics that inform those decisions, rather than building a dashboard with every available metric. A dashboard with fewer, well-defined metrics gets used far more than one with fifty tiles nobody checks.