Why Tableau doesn’t help to improve your product
As a product manager, you’re likely already familiar with Tableau. It’s a popular data visualization tool used by many organizations to help them understand their data better. But despite its popularity, Tableau doesn’t actually help improve your product. In this blog post, we’ll explain why and offer some alternatives that will be more beneficial for your product team.
While Tableau is a great visualization tool, it doesn’t necessarily help improve your product. In fact, it can often make it worse.
The reason for this is that Tableau can be misused to create visualizations that are misleading or inaccurate. This can lead to decision makers making poor decisions based on the data, which can ultimately negatively impact the product.
Additionally, Tableau only works with data that is already collected. This seems obvious, but usually you find out too late that you’re not collecting the right data, as you’re making your reports and visualizations. If the data is not there, then Tableau will be of little help. Compare this with Stormly, which makes sure all necessary data is being collected automatically, for all possible product analytics scenarios.
But that’s only where it starts. Once the data is in, you have to think about how to build queries and visualizations from scratch; that is, if you know what metrics you should be looking at, and how to translate those to actual queries. Take a seemingly simple active users analysis for example. First, you need to define and model what behavior makes a user active. Then, you need to think about how you will compare trends and segments of different active users. All this takes a lot of manual work, knowledge and experimentation to get right.
Another benefit is that Stormly allows you to re-use user segments that you define once, apply user filters, and zoom in on specific user behavior, in every single insight. To do this in a BI tool like Tableau with the same ease, is simply not possible due to the BI tool being too flexible for its own good. So for product analytics, Tableau will not help you improve your product. You need a specialized product analytics platform like Stormly for that. If you’d like to visualize your inventory, orders etc, then a BI tool is a great choice, but not for product analytics.
With Stormly, we’re hosting the data in the cloud for you. Best of all, we have ready insights that contain not only the analysis, but also visualization and in some cases we apply machine learning models, all so that we can automatically deliver to you ready and actionable insights. Our active users insight for example lets you define behavior that makes a user active, with one or two clicks.
Tableau can also be expensive, and the cost of licenses can add up quickly. If you’re not careful, you could end up spending more on Tableau than you would on improving your product.
To compare, Stormly is the only platform that simplifies and unites your data for insights. With Stormly you can re-use segmentation, user filters or behavior in every report with ease because of its flexibility, without having to put in considerable manual work and experimentation like with other BI tools.
Stormly provides product analytics reporting at an affordable price while still delivering great value!
Another crucial aspect is that Tableau requires a certain amount of technical expertise to use effectively. If you don’t have the right team in place, you could find yourself wasting a lot of time and money on a tool that doesn’t really benefit your product.
What’s more, Tableau is a business intelligence tool that has powerful visualizations, but you have to do everything from scratch; including building a data warehouse where all user interactions with your product are stored.
And cleaning and ingesting data alone takes a lot of resources and people who are already skilled in BI products. Even if you were to outsource the data preparation, it would be an extra cost on top of Tableau licenses.
In contrast, Stormly does all the work for you by automatically tracking product usage data and events. This data is then made available through easy-to-use interface and gives you ready insights and visualizations, so you can focus on building your product, instead of worrying about data preparation. As a result, Stormly helps you to quickly and easily improve your product based on real user data.
Stormly offers a solution where you don’t have to worry about hosting or loading your own data. We do this for our clients by automatically pulling from their sources and delivering ready-to use visualizations and insights complete with machine learning all in one place!
And our visualizations are designed to help you quickly identify areas of opportunity and take action to improve your product. So if you’re looking for a BI platform that will help you build a better product, Stormly is the right choice.
To sum up, while Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool, it doesn’t necessarily help to improve your product. Tableau can be used to create beautiful, interactive visualizations of your product data, but it can’t tell you what to do with that data. In order to use Tableau effectively, you need to have a clear understanding of your product and what you want to achieve with your data. Otherwise, you’ll just be looking at pretty pictures without any real direction. So while Tableau can be a valuable asset, it’s not going to magically improve your product on its own. You need to put in the work to make that happen.
That’s where Stormly comes in. We are the right platform for product teams, made specifically to help you build a better product. With our easy-to-use interface and powerful features, you can quickly get insights into how your users are interacting with your product and make changes that will improve all the metrics.
So if you’re looking for a BI platform that will help you build a better product, sign up and give us a try today!