May 2026
Beginner
240 pages
3h 48m
English
Content preview from Driving Buy-In
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CHAPTER SEVENDESIGN—VISUALS THAT DRIVE ACTION
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction.”
—E.F. Schumacher
The phone rang at 9:30 a.m. on a Friday morning. Never good news.
“Mico, I need to talk to you about the dashboard.”
My stomach sank. Oh no. I knew that tone.
It was the VP of Customer Success I'd been working with. Three weeks earlier, we had done a storyboard session with his team, and he was thrilled.
“This looks great. Happy to see the team on the same page,” he'd said, looking at the storyboard.
That was three weeks ago.
Now?
“The storyboard was perfect,” he continued as his voice dropped. “Everyone bought in. But when I showed them the dashboard…”
Long pause.
“They looked overwhelmed and confused. Dina, our senior analyst, raised her hand and asked…”
He didn't even need to finish. I already knew.
“Is there a way to export this to Excel?”
Ugh. The dreaded export request. The kiss of death for any analytics project. It means the dashboard just became a glorified export tool. Months of work reduced to a single CSV file.
I wanted to crawl under my desk and hide.
“I think they asked to export to Excel to build out another report. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid…” he said with disappointment.
Export to Excel isn't a feature request. It’s a sign of failure.
The storyboard had created alignment—but the dashboard was clearly broken. It had too much information crammed on one screen. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.