The best thing you can do for your Tableau team this week

Have you just recently returned from TC26 in San Diego?

If so, my guess is you came home with something you didn't pack on the way out. That feeling of possibility you only get when you're surrounded by people who care about the same things you do.

This year felt different to me. The energy was more intense - in a good way. The focus was back on analysts and what they can do with Tableau, on real problems and real solutions, not on the noise that can sometimes surround a big technology conference. I left thinking: this felt like Tableau again. The community, the craft, the genuine excitement about what the tool makes possible.

On the flight home I kept thinking about a question that came up in multiple conversations with analytics managers, team leads, people who care deeply about their analysts and want to keep them growing:

"Our people are talented and they want to learn. But they're stretched. How do we actually make space for development without pulling them away from the work that has to get done?"

I've been thinking about this question for a long time. Long enough that I actually built something designed to answer it.

Makeover Monday

Back in 2016, Andy Cotgreave joined me in launching Makeover Monday as the first Tableau community project. The idea was simple: take a published data visualization each week, use the underlying dataset, and build something better. One dataset. One hour(ish). And the focus was on learning and experimenting with the community.

In 2017, Eva Murray took over from Andy Cotgreave and together we ran the project for several years. The fact that Eva is also my co-builder on NLT for Teams is not a coincidence. She understood from the very beginning what this kind of structured, repeated practice does for analysts over time.

What we discovered is that the constraint is the point. A one-hour limit with an unfamiliar dataset sharpens people’s focus and forces them to make decisions. It builds the kind of creative muscle that only develops through repetition and consistency.

Bring it back to your team

Here is what I'd suggest you try with your team.

Set aside 60 minutes every Monday. Give your analysts a Makeover Monday dataset and ask them to build a visualization within that hour. The goal is not a finished product. The goal is a deliberate challenge. To keep it from becoming routine, give each session a single focus area. One week the attention is on formatting and visual polish. The next it might be storytelling, or interactive design, or building a custom metric from scratch. One constraint, one hour, one thing to get better at.

What I've seen, consistently, across years of analysts doing this kind of practice, is that it does not come at the cost of their other work. It trains the part of them that makes all their other work faster and sharper. The hour pays for itself by the end of the week.

Try it out and let me know how it goes. I genuinely mean that.

The datasets are free, the format is simple, and your team might just surprise you.

If you’ve already engaged your people with these community projects and you’re ready to take things further, let’s talk about NLT for Teams. You can book a call with Eva and me here.