Big Champagne

Big Champagne aggregated online music listening data from dozens of industry sources at a time when the industry's own numbers still came from sales. The data was the product, the dashboard was how major label customers got at it, and the dashboard was what competitors were being judged against.

I came onto a build the client had already reviewed and rejected a long defect list on, cleared it against a short deadline, then rebuilt the dashboard's charts to a new visual specification — adding features and improving performance, with supporting work on the Rails and JavaScript layers underneath.

Analytics interfaces live or die on how fast someone gets from a question to a number. Dashboards accumulate clutter faster than any other kind of product, because every stakeholder in the building wants their own metric on the front page and each one sounds reasonable in isolation.

Arriving onto a build the client has already rejected takes its own discipline. I cleared the defect list before raising anything else, including the things I thought were wrong with the architecture.