Improve cross-functional team success w/ this one thing (Plus Kibana dashboard examples!)

Good morning techies!🌤️

A product manager asked me:

I have two answers to this question: first, having great documentation & Standard Operating Procedures (duh). Second, it's setting up a *banging* data dashboard. Yep, bet you haven't heard that one before. If you're curious why, scroll down and read the rest of this newsletter 😁

I'll also introduce you to the industry popular data visualization tool Kibana–the last tool in the ELK stack–along with some dashboard examples!

This is a juicy💦 issue, and you don't want to miss it. Put your engineering hats on and let's get to upskilling techies!

Irene 👩‍💻

As always, visit Skiplevel to learn more or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter and follow Skiplevel on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Got a topic you want me to cover in an upcoming newsletter? Tell me what it is!

I love *love love loveeee* helping non-engineering professionals and teams like you and yours build confidence through technical literacy and learning best ways of collaborating with dev teams. It's my mission with Skiplevel and I'm asking for your help in this mission!

All you gotta do is fill out this super short 2 question form and tell me what you want to see in future newsletter issues. I'll look through your suggestions and add the most popular topics into upcoming issues! Thank you in advance 🥰

Check out my episode on the Lessons in Product Management podcast!

In case you missed it on my Twitter or LinkedIn–I guested on John Fontenot's Lessons in Product Management podcast and it went live last week! I talked with John about quite a large breadth of topics. Here's just a few:

• Misconceptions of “Being Technical”

• The Spectrum of “Technical”

• PM Anti-Patterns Working w/ Dev

• Effective Collaboration w/ Dev

• Benefits of Tech Mentorship

Listen to the episode and subscribe to Lessons in Product Management on your favorite channels:Spotify – Youtube – Apple Podcasts – Castbox

Data Dashboards for Search & Visualization 101

Data visualization 101

Data visualization–popularly referred to as data viz–is its own movement at the intersection of data, engineering, and design and it's essential to analyzing, monitoring, and extracting insights from data. Data viz is the discipline of representing information & data using visual elements like graphs, charts, timelines and maps. Using visual elements our eyes and brains are better able to pick up on trends compared to looking at a big ol' spreadsheet. In other words, you can think of data viz as storytelling for big data.. and we all know how powerful storytelling can be!

What about data search in relation to data dashboards? 🤨

In December's newsletter issue on search, you learned how difficult it is to filter and sort through massive amounts of data and how engineers solve the issue by using a search and analytics engine. The use case I covered was for customer-facing features but with data dashboards, we're using the search functionality for internal business purposes like metrics, looking up user actions, and feature/product usage.

The importance of Data Dashboards

Setting up data dashboards is a must-have for every team because using a data dashboard for search and visualization is critical in today's world of big data. Yet the majority of product managers have no idea what it is nor how it benefits the product roadmap and long-term team and product success!

It's a big mistake for product managers not to make metrics and data dashboards a P0 requirement for new features and products, and here's why..

Want to feel more confident in your technical skills?

Start your journey now, and become more technical in just 5 weeks, without learning to code!

P.S. We also train teams! Find out more at skiplevel.co/teams and book a call with us to get started.