Day 3 at #TC25: From Dashboards to Data Products – The Shift Toward Composable, Scalable Insight

As Day 3 of the Tableau Conference wrapped up, one theme was unmistakably clear: data is becoming a product, and how we manage, scale, and govern it is transforming rapidly.

🚀 The Rise of Data Productisation

A standout session dove deep into how organizations are shifting from fragmented, ad-hoc analytics to scalable, reliable, and governed data products. The benefits? Fewer workarounds, better transparency, empowered governance, and most importantly—faster business decisions.

A compelling decision framework was presented to help teams know when to scale a new data product. It moves from:

• Hypothesis and Experiments

• Through Improvement and Development

• To Scaling and finally, Actionable Insight

This journey bridges the gap between data specialists and business users, aligning everyone around outcomes rather than just technology.

🧠 Organizational Accountability and Principles

To support this evolution, we need:

• Top-down accountability

• Federated data stewardship

• Domain-level ownership

• And skills development across both technical and soft skill areas

The supporting principles—simplify tooling, improve access, build data literacy, and change the operating model—help establish this foundation.

One particularly resonant quote from the day:

“Technology alone doesn’t transform organizations. It merely amplifies existing cultures and power structures.”

– Wendy Turner-Williams

This perspective reframes our obsession with dashboards: transformation happens when we address culture, behavior, and shared accountability.

📦 Composable Data Sources: The Future of Tableau

We also saw Tableau showcase a major leap forward: Composable Data Sources.

This new capability allows analysts to:

• Reuse and relate published data sources (PDSes)

• Avoid data duplication across workbooks

• Nest PDSes and maintain governance + flexibility

• Layer relationships and join logic without having to rebuild connections

The UX demo was clean and intuitive, showing a bookshop sales model with modular data sources (Sales, Authors, Checkouts, etc.) stitched together into a cohesive data layer—all without duplication.

This has massive implications for data scalability, security, and analytics performance. It’s a huge win for enterprise BI teams managing complex environments.

💡 Final Thoughts

Day 3 underscored that we’re at a turning point: it’s no longer about dashboards alone—it’s about treating data as a product. That means thinking in terms of reusability, governance, clarity of ownership, and measurable outcomes.

#TC25 continues to highlight why Tableau remains at the forefront—not just in visualization, but in how we organize and activate data across the enterprise.

🔁 Let’s connect if you’re rethinking your data architecture or considering how to make your dashboards more scalable, productized, and impactful.

#Tableau #DataProductization #ComposableDataSources #DataStrategy #DataGovernance #AnalyticsLeadership #SystemPhysics