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Data Studio fills a weird niche. At my previous job I built a report in it and sent it to a client (approved by my manager). The client was ecstatic. They loved

by soared 8y ago

Data Studio fills a weird niche. At my previous job I built a report in it and sent it to a client (approved by my manager). The client was ecstatic. They loved the report, how easy it was to understand, pretty design, etc. When this feedback got back to our CTO he was furious because no one else on my team was technical enough to use data studio, so I effectively delivered a product only I could produce. All our reports were typically made in microsoft word with screenshots of graphs from excel. Data studio is a little too technical for most people, but not technical enough for another large group of people. It like photoshop + pivot tables. It works incredibly well for a small set of people who are semi-technical, already know how to analyze data, and have some graphic design senses. I expect google to kill it eventually, or integrate it into analytics/google ads/dbm/etc and kill the spreadsheet integration.

bsg75 8y ago
> All our reports were typically made in microsoft word with screenshots of graphs from excel. Ironically the CTO wanted a format that lacked reproducability
- cosmie 8y ago
  I do a lot of work where I rapidly mature business functions/processes, generally related to analytics and data work. I basically fill a self-supporting business role, while handling the technical needs until the processes fully mature. A core concern of mid/upper level management is sustainability, reproducibility, and maintainability of processes. The CTO wanted a format that could be reliabily reproduced by the skill sets that were staffed, even if the report itself was less robust than the Data Studio version. By introducing a new capability to a client, the CTO is in a bind to either adjust staffing to ensure deliverability of that capability or potentially risk losing a client if they ever have to switch back to the previous reporting after having elevated the clients expectations. And the issue expands beyond that one client. It can potentially disrupt the expectations of other clients, and shift internal demand away from the types of reports your existing staff are capable of producing. And that's a huge can of worms since the demand may shift faster than attrition, leaving the CTO in the uncomfortable spot of having an existing staff with a rapidly dwindling internal demand and yet still needing to aggressively hire for the newer skillset. If it had been used internally, rather than being exposed to the client, then it probably would have been received better by the CTO. A technical analogy would be the CTO learning that a manager had approved exposing an unofficial API to important external users, and that the users loved it. So then you either piss the users off by taking it away and shifting them back to the cruddy old official API, or suddenly have a need to put resources behind ensuring that unofficial API is up to snuff and matches the same SLA with your official one.
  - soared 8y ago
    This is excellent perspective, thank you.
oavdeev 8y ago
That set of people is not that small; it is basically what people in business analyst roles do all day. They know Excel very well and maybe even a bit of python/js, have a good understanding of the business problem at hand, but not technical enough to do full on custom reports from scratch. Data Studio fits squarely in this market of tools for them, and that space is growing and pretty crowded. There a multiple big businesses built on producing tools just like that, for example Tableau (public company valued at ~10B as of today). Granted, Data Studio is more basic but it is free and nicely integrates with the rest of Google data product suite (Analytics, Sheets, BigQuery). I don't think it will go away, and I think it is actually the strongest part of google cloud offering (and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup).
- soared 8y ago
  Thats a good point. My use is purely in the contest of advertising agencies where that role is very small. Most people are very good at analysing their specific channel, but can't do it in general.
- cosmie 8y ago
  > and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup AWS has a similar product, QuickSight[1]. It's not my favorite to use, but integrates with the AWS ecosystem as easily as Data Studio integrates with the Google ecosystem. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/ https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/
  - oavdeev 8y ago
    Yeah QuickSight is their shot at that market. But (anecdotally) I don't think it getting much traction. The fact that they didn't have any flashy announcements about it at re:Invent this year somewhat corroborates that. There is something in Amazon DNA that prevents them from building great UX-centric products. Besides, without something like Google Sheets or Excel it is not that useful, inevitably you have a ton of small data across the org that is stored in spreadsheets. One obvious play for Amazon is to just pay a ton of cash and acquire something like Airtable, but they don't seem to be for sale.

by soared 8y ago

bsg75 8y ago

> All our reports were typically made in microsoft word with screenshots of graphs from excel. Ironically the CTO wanted a format that lacked reproducability

cosmie 8y ago
I do a lot of work where I rapidly mature business functions/processes, generally related to analytics and data work. I basically fill a self-supporting business role, while handling the technical needs until the processes fully mature. A core concern of mid/upper level management is sustainability, reproducibility, and maintainability of processes. The CTO wanted a format that could be reliabily reproduced by the skill sets that were staffed, even if the report itself was less robust than the Data Studio version. By introducing a new capability to a client, the CTO is in a bind to either adjust staffing to ensure deliverability of that capability or potentially risk losing a client if they ever have to switch back to the previous reporting after having elevated the clients expectations. And the issue expands beyond that one client. It can potentially disrupt the expectations of other clients, and shift internal demand away from the types of reports your existing staff are capable of producing. And that's a huge can of worms since the demand may shift faster than attrition, leaving the CTO in the uncomfortable spot of having an existing staff with a rapidly dwindling internal demand and yet still needing to aggressively hire for the newer skillset. If it had been used internally, rather than being exposed to the client, then it probably would have been received better by the CTO. A technical analogy would be the CTO learning that a manager had approved exposing an unofficial API to important external users, and that the users loved it. So then you either piss the users off by taking it away and shifting them back to the cruddy old official API, or suddenly have a need to put resources behind ensuring that unofficial API is up to snuff and matches the same SLA with your official one.
- soared 8y ago
  This is excellent perspective, thank you.

oavdeev 8y ago

That set of people is not that small; it is basically what people in business analyst roles do all day. They know Excel very well and maybe even a bit of python/js, have a good understanding of the business problem at hand, but not technical enough to do full on custom reports from scratch. Data Studio fits squarely in this market of tools for them, and that space is growing and pretty crowded. There a multiple big businesses built on producing tools just like that, for example Tableau (public company valued at ~10B as of today). Granted, Data Studio is more basic but it is free and nicely integrates with the rest of Google data product suite (Analytics, Sheets, BigQuery). I don't think it will go away, and I think it is actually the strongest part of google cloud offering (and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup).

soared 8y ago
Thats a good point. My use is purely in the contest of advertising agencies where that role is very small. Most people are very good at analysing their specific channel, but can't do it in general.
cosmie 8y ago
> and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup AWS has a similar product, QuickSight[1]. It's not my favorite to use, but integrates with the AWS ecosystem as easily as Data Studio integrates with the Google ecosystem. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/ https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/
- oavdeev 8y ago
  Yeah QuickSight is their shot at that market. But (anecdotally) I don't think it getting much traction. The fact that they didn't have any flashy announcements about it at re:Invent this year somewhat corroborates that. There is something in Amazon DNA that prevents them from building great UX-centric products. Besides, without something like Google Sheets or Excel it is not that useful, inevitably you have a ton of small data across the org that is stored in spreadsheets. One obvious play for Amazon is to just pay a ton of cash and acquire something like Airtable, but they don't seem to be for sale.