Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?
I've worked in many analytics projects across a number of companies as a consultant. I'm a big believer in "decision support systems". Find out <i>what</i> decisions your customers need to make, repeatedly, to their job.  Quantify the heuristics and visualize that information (and that information only) in an easy to consume manner.  More often than not <i>that's an email or PDF</i>. Another advantage is that by <i>supporting</i> the business users they feel less threatened by the changes or technology.<p>I think "self-serve" analytics is silly, the idea that you put all of the data in front of people and they'll derive "insights". That's not how normal people or data work. We just had a discussion on HN the other day about Facebook's Prophet, and its pitfalls.  Meanwhile we expect Joe in sales to be able to identify useful trends on a chart he made.  <i>Every</i> company needs to forecast, regardless of their sophistication.  That stuff needs to be defined by the right people and given to the users.