Hubsessed Office Hours: Reporting and Dashboards · Every clip

Four jobs you hire your data for

Joshua Oakes · Wednesday, November 11, 2026

A stakeholder sends a reporting request and you can't tell what they need it for. In Reporting and Dashboards Office Hours I said my philosophy is that there are four jobs you hire your data for: 1. Make regular decisions. Things we think about daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, and they need to be pretty consistent from check to check. 2. Prioritize from known options. Which of these should we focus on this quarter? 3. Communicate something. Like a board deck, where you need to explain why performance was up or down, and what to do about it. 4. Explore unknowns. In reporting, that's the bounded kind: "we don't know, so we're going to dig into the data and find it." The unbounded kind is research. If you can break a request into one of those jobs, you can start to figure out whether it's a process problem, whether you just don't have a report, or whether the report in the format it's in doesn't make sense. It works for planning too. For a big initiative, ask what regular decisions, prioritization, communication and unknowns it will need. The full session: https://www.hubsessed.io/office-hours/reporting-dashboards/2026-11-11