r/analytics • u/abralytics • Feb 20 '26
Support If I build one more "urgent" dashboard that gets zero views, I’m going to lose my mind.
Context: I am the marketing analyst for a massive, global company. They have thousands of employees, endless layers of middle management, and a bottomless appetite for "data-driven insights" that nobody actually looks at.
I’m hitting a wall, and I need to vent/get some advice before I just start sitting on my hands until its asked for 3 times.
Here is the weekly cycle:
- I get a frantic ping at 4:00 PM on a Tuesday. "We need a deep dive on X. We needed this yesterday for a leadership sync."
- I drop everything, pivot, clean the messy data, build the visualizations, provide some insights on the results, and send it over.
- No "thanks," no follow-up questions, nothing.
- Two weeks later, the person who "needed it yesterday" is ASKING FOR THE SAME THING. It's demoralizing.
How do you guys handle this?
I’ve tried the "value-based" approach where I ask what decision this data will drive before I build it, but they just give me some corporate buzzwords about "visibility."
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u/QianLu Feb 20 '26
These requests should be going to your manager. It's their job to triage stakeholder poor planning and fishing for stuff they're never going to use.
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
I feel like this is it- there’s no filter. What sucks is that my current manager didn’t hire me and the one that did was laid off. My current manager had her own team prior and now I feel like the stepchild.
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u/johnnieA12 Feb 20 '26
I’ve been in that position before. There’s gotta be a name for that corporate stepchild feeling/scenario
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u/daisiesarepretty2 Feb 21 '26
When is the best time to start looking for a new role? 2 months ago.
you can’t fix this problem from the bottom up. unless you have other connections in the company and can transfer, find another job.
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u/dmarsee76 Feb 20 '26
Agreed.
Also, let the manager of the person who requested this know what they are asking of you.
Encourage your manager and their manager discuss the (1) randomization, (2) value of your time, and (3) the lack of the use of the requested output.
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u/analytix_guru Feb 21 '26
Jumping on this response thread... Doesn't matter the situation, your current (whoever) manager should be filtering these requests, determining whether these are even emergencies or priorities in the first place. I had situations at prior companies where internal stakeholders wouldn't take no for an answer, when their request wasn't really that urgent or important (especially to out queue, we were always slammed and had to say no or prioritize requests with expectations, as in you might not get this for a month it's not a priority)
Any good analysis to answer a question should circle back to company objectives and goals, and so if the question being asked of leadership doesn't support their own objectives and goals, then they probably shouldn't be raising the alarm in the first place.
There is a time and place for emergencies and even then they should be handled with care (internal/external audit issues, regulatory requests, etc).
It comes back to advocating for yourself/team by having your active manager advocate for you and your team. If they refuse to help then maybe it's time to look elsewhere. Not that it's a great job market at the moment, but at least you can look while you are gainfully employed.
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u/Firm_Bit Feb 24 '26
This is exactly how you end up stuck in the same position.
Manager gets context and gets to build relationship, decides to curry favor by getting you to do work that isn’t important and overall gets to decide more of your career.
You have to be able to field these requests and vet them yourself. Otherwise you just become an endpoint - request comes in and data goes out.
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u/Grey_Raven Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
I generally handle it by getting annoyed then using that rage to power through some job applications as soon as I get off work and hope that I can get a better job where I'm not dealing with this sort of nonsense. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism or most successful way of doing job applications admittedly.
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u/Carpocalypto Feb 20 '26
This is my experience exactly at a $1B+ revenue client. I’ve been dealing with this for years. There’s nothing you can do about it. The company doesn’t have a culture of thinking ahead, anticipating higher level inquiries, or developing an understanding of issues.
One thing that’s helped me is to do the anticipation myself. There are 4-5 main ‘areas’ of the business that the urgent requests come from, and usually it’s the same data at the core of the requirement. I’ve built what are essentially shell dashboards with all the data in the back end. When I get an urgent request I just load that file, rename it, and build the visuals and any new add-on measures, etc.
Edit: I’ve been able to recently get away with sending a screenshot of the dashboard instead of publishing it (the executives and upper managers don’t like interacting with filters anyway) so that saves some time, and keeps the published workspaces clean.
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
I started building out what you did in your second paragraph. But the first makes me wanna say adios 😫
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u/Jagsfan82 Feb 21 '26
In general we have all areas of the business modeled out in qlik across a few different apps in the most granular way possible. Its not always perfectly usable due to size of somw datasets but all we do is drop what we dont need for that request and in general we can build whatever pretty quickly in terms of short term "emergency" QA
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u/lemonbottles_89 Feb 20 '26
My manager and senior coworker are working on a ticketing system for this exact reason where it forces people to slow down and actually explain what they want, why and who is going to be responsible for the ask, etc
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
I’ve implemented this but need to enforce it. Everything come through teams and I need to funnel them to Jira
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u/Physical-Ad2968 Feb 23 '26
I think this is a huge step! Then you can easily show the queue when you give time estimates and force stakeholders to explain exactly what they want. Still, hard to do with leadership, you'll have to really stick to enforcing it
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u/balrog687 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Lol.
Your first task is to emotionally disengage from work.
Your only job is to minimize your personal effort and get more money.
Do as you are told, but don't rush and don't put your body and soul into it. Don't go above and beyond. Do the bare minimum that doesn't get you fired.
Big corporations are "an opera" nothing is really urgent or important, but you have to "fake it" anyways. The higher you are in the ladder, the more important is to "fake it" the right way. It really doesn't matter.
Save your time and energy and mental focus for a personal passion project or hobby, or overwork if you are 100% remote. Be smart and take shortcuts to early retirement.
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u/caleb1783 Feb 20 '26
even w all the pretty dashboards, management still wants weekly email report w exact same data.. i just go w it ..
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u/ForeverRED48 Feb 20 '26
I’m currently also marketing aligned and when I am able to find employment elsewhere it will never be working with marketing again if I can help it.
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
God speed to you. Although I wouldn’t say it’s a marketing thing, definitely organizational
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u/ForeverRED48 Feb 20 '26
For sure. It can happen with any stakeholder group. There is definitely a culture of allowing that type of behavior and unless those in charge are willing to adapt a more structured process we are stuck in this cycle.
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
Yup, new execs at this org. The company got bought out by private equity. It’s going to hell in a ferrari
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u/white_tiger_dream Feb 20 '26
This exact situation happened at my company when we got bought by private equity.
At first, we had the opposite culture of your post. I built useful dashboards that got tons of views. The ONE time a Director asked me for a dashboard and I saw that it got no views, I mentioned it to my Manager, as I was a little hurt. It literally became a code red situation. My manager got her and all the other Directors together on a call, where respect towards his analytics team was re-emphasized. We didn’t use a ticketing system, just Teams, and he threatened to implement one if this ever happened again. He never wanted to hear another time wasting request had hit my desk ever again. The expectation was for us to be productive, and this was the opposite of that. She was red in the face.
Then we got bought by Private Equity. It became a complete shit show, just like what you described. Constant putting out fires that nobody followed up on. A lack of responsibility for products across the business. Everything was URGENT but there was no clear direction, no clear communication, no reasoning. It was always stress and no accountability. I also caught other analysts and database engineers LITERALLY stealing my and my team’s work—I’m talking like taking my dashboards, republishing them so my name wouldn’t be on it, and sending them to executives saying they built it.
They didn’t want me on their team, but they wanted all of my work—including the work they didn’t know how to do.
PE is a very toxic environment. Because it’s made up of survivors of layoffs everyone has a scarcity mentality about their job and it’s way too political to be efficient. Use your network of former coworkers to look for something new.
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u/abralytics Feb 20 '26
We are living the exact same life and that life is punishment for something we did in a previous
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u/bobby_table5 Feb 20 '26
Ask them for three things:
- scenario 1
- scenario 2
- what number would make them go between the two
If they don’t have that, neither do you.
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u/jarie Feb 20 '26
Dashboards. The ultimate “see, I’m making progress.”
Sorry you need to deal with that thrash. I wish they could just make their own :-).
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Feb 20 '26
been there, at some point you have to add a little friction or you’ll just become the emergency dashboard factory. i usually start asking what specific decision or meeting this supports and what happens if it’s not ready, and if the answer is vague, it goes into a backlog instead of killing my current work. another thing that helps is tracking usage and resurfacing it, like “last three of these had zero views after week one,” which makes the cost visible without being confrontational. if they still insist, at least you’ve created a paper trail that it was their priority call, not yours.
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u/Ganado1 Feb 21 '26
The issue is usually they need to see the data in a format that makes sense to their brain. I go directly to three stakeholders and ask them to show me. Not tell me. Exactly what they do and what they need. Have them do a little mock up in Excell.
Migrate them one visual at a time to a better way of viewing.
My pet peeve is gas gauge displays. People love these and they don't really tell you anything.
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u/Backoutside1 Feb 20 '26
Um I set boundaries such as, your lack of planning doesn’t make it my emergency. Also, laptop closes at 3pm sharp idc. Lastly if emergencies are happening on a regular basis, I need proper compensation, whatever your number is.
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u/SprinklesFresh5693 Feb 21 '26
Either dtart looking for a new job, or talk to your manager about it, she/he should be the one in charge of mediating and checking with the rest of departments for somewhat healthy deadlines.
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u/Jagsfan82 Feb 21 '26
These people are playing whack a mole and no one stands up to them and tells them to knock it off
"OMG THIS METRIC ISNT AS GOOD AS WE WANTED... WE HAVE TO KNOW EVERY DETAIL OF WHY"
Oh ya? You mean the metric you have no idea what it means, you werent oaying attention to weeks ago, and no idea what the data details that make it? The one you have done no deep dive on to find out if its a leading metric of something or a trailing metric of something else? The one you have no idea if you prioritize it and incentive on it what behaviors would actually change and if your business would actually benefit from?
Fuck off and go do actual performance management analysis and come back to me without being a psychopath
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u/Mnemnosine Excel Feb 21 '26
It’s a power move by mid-to-senior management, based on other power moves.
A VP of Sales/BizDev/Ops/Marketing (almost always one of those 4 groups) needs to show they are a player, so they look at an executive summary/dataset that covers 97% of the business needs and plans. But to score a talking point for their next interview for an executive position (because tenures for most VPs and Presidents tends to be <2 years), or to cover for an insecurity in their current position, they will come up with a “new” approach to a temporary problem. This of course needs further analysis because it may fall into that 3% gap, but that isn’t the point. The point is to be seen and heard giving the order, for political points. Bonus points if this actually does end up addressing and even solving a problem.
That order then flows down the chain to the analyst. Because the chain must carry the order. And if the culture of the company isn’t actively policed against this kind of behavior BY THE CEO OR CFO, then blame for lack of follow up will also flow down the chain to the analyst. Because no one can be seen to take the blame but the lowest rung of the ladder.
I like a lot of the “pre-build” solutions; those are the best answer. It keeps the analyst and their manager looking good—and chances are good no one above that level gives a shit or will look at the dashboard unless it actually does address or solve a problem.
AI platforms will now serve as a really good scapegoat; that’s also a fundamental Bad Thing. Scapegoating incentivizes poor corporate performance and ineffective management/leadership.
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u/swap761 Feb 21 '26
One thing helped us was to set expectations with Marketing super boss that end users need to learn SQL and get their own insights. We will only be providing clean raw data + some basic flat tables. And folks use all sorts of AI to build SQL and get their own answers by quering the warehouse.
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u/triplestumperking Feb 24 '26
Your stakeholders are learning SQL? That's wild.
At my org we still have stakeholders who don't even know how to search their report catalogue for a report that was built for them and need their hand held to type into a search bar for a report name you shared with them. And after I send out an excel file with full analysis charts/pivot tables I frequently get emails back because the stakeholder doesn't know how to filter a pivot table.
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u/swap761 Feb 26 '26
Everything is possible in startups, all you need is some convincing the founders and you are set. But yeah tough to do so in large orgs.
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u/leonidas_elanra Feb 21 '26
This is so real. Spent years building dashboards that nobody looks at, then everyone's surprised when you stop caring about the data. The "urgent" requests usually mean nobody planned ahead, not that your dashboard failed them.
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u/Ok-Working3200 Feb 22 '26
Always a pain the butt. Do you have an mcp server to connected to an llm? This could help with some requests.
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u/adastra1930 Feb 23 '26
A good way to minimize this is to invest in understanding what motivates your stakeholders outside of their requests. A common motivation for stuff like you describe is “not wanting to get yelled at in a meeting” - so they want data cut in all the ways so they can pick the one that makes them look best. That will never happen in a dashboard, hence the endless requests.
BUT if you can identify that’s what’s happening, you might be able to build a tool that helps them self-serve. Or even better, if you can get at what’s really, really important (I.e. build a dashboard to help them drive so much extra revenue they don’t care about minutiae), that helps quiet the noise AND looks great in your professional portfolio 😉
Also: weaponized incompetence is your friend, but use caution 😉
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u/owoxInc Feb 23 '26
Been there. Two things helped me stop the urgent dashboard -> zero views -> asked again loop:
First, I stopped building dashboards and started shipping something more repeatable.
So here is what I'd do every time - I’d turn the request into a tiny governed question answer / dataset + a metric definition.
Sure, this should be based on the data in the warehouse (single definition of X, with owner + SQL / transformation + refresh schedule).
Then I give them a Google Sheet to answer - and set the update schedule for that Sheet.
Next time - they just don't ask - they know where to find it… \ + I have a sinfle place where I manage all that.
Second, I require a receipt: who’s the consumer, what cadence, and where it will live (typically a Slack channel).
If they can’t name that, it becomes best effort not fire drill
If your org supports it, a data mart layer is basically designed for this: reusable data marts + consistent metrics + spreadsheet access, so you’re not re-answering the same question via new dashboards.
Curious, what’s the most common metric name they keep re-requesting?
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u/Firm_Bit Feb 24 '26
It’s your fault.
You dropped everything because someone else wanted to maybe show a neat picture at a meeting where nothing will be decided. You didn’t dig into why they needed it. Or how they would change decisions if they found x or y. If they give you buzzwords then you dig into it. You have to know the business well enough to be able to evaluate asks.
This type of role will be automated away. The person who only knows how to serve data.
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u/StamGoat Mar 08 '26
I still remember that time when one of my stakeholders escalated to my manager and my skip manager because in the mock-up version of this huge dashboard I was building, I forgot to update the name of one of the many metrics (a three lines kpi name for your information just to give you an idea of the whole project...). The dev dashboard was ok. Never clicked. The prod dashboard? Opened once. I'm not even mentioning that requirements where lost in a couple of powerpoint presentations, one excel, multiple Teams chats. That's it, until the next one.
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u/Euphoric_Dance4150 Mar 10 '26
You have few options, speak up about it with your manager or agree that its just work. We have spent hundreds of hours in the past doing stuff what customers requested but then never ended up being used. It hurts for a while but then again, you got paid to do it.
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u/john-uebersax Mar 17 '26
Start "slow-rolling" the requests that don't have a clear ROI or a specific decision attached to them. I used to think I had to be the hero, but now I just tell people I'm booked until Friday and suddenly half those "emergencies" miraculously solve themselves or disappear entirely.
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