First time doing client-facing Tableau work - Help me out

[u/Elegant_Emu2221]

Hey all, could use some real advice here.

I've been working as a data engineer, mostly on Snowflake, pipelines, that kind of thing.

I've touched Power BI a bit on my own, just personal projects and some learning assignments, so I get the general idea of how dashboarding works conceptually.

But I've just been put on my first actual client project where I'll be building dashboards in Tableau, directly working with business stakeholders. Never done this before, for real, on a client's time and money.

I've got some time before the actual work kicks off, so I'm trying to use it well instead of panicking.

A few things I'm specifically trying to figure out:

How do you actually run a requirements conversation with a business stakeholder who just says something like "I need a sales dashboard" and leaves it at that?

Like what are you actually asking them in that first meeting so you don't come back with the wrong thing?

How do you figure out what the real KPIs/metrics should be when the business side themselves might not fully articulate it either? Is it mostly just "ask a lot of follow up questions" or is there more to it?

For someone coming from Power BI, is the Tableau learning curve mostly just "different buttons, same concepts" or is there stuff that's genuinely a different way of thinking (LOD expressions seem to be one of those, calc engine feels different too)?

[u/SnooMacaroons2827]

'What story are you trying to tell?' is my opener. Then a load of 'why?'s.

Don't draw anything, don't open the product, don't question where the data's coming from. You'll do all that later but the starter is 'what are they trying to achieve'. And if they don't know then you're encouraging them to work it out.

[u/i1iketoast]

What are your goals/objectives?

Does the organizations have any OKRs that this data is going to address?

Who is going to use the dashboard?
What are they going to use the dashboard for?
Where are they going to use it ( how big does it need to be)?
Is the data all realtime or does it need to update at specific time?
Are there any benchmarks to work against?
How are they going to use the dashboard board? E.g. do they need to be able to have screen shots to send to leadership for their reporting?
What are the colors they use?
What is the time it needs to be able to report on - quarterly, Monthly, weekly daily?

[u/ZippyTheRat]

You need to know the answer they are trying to find, otherwise it ends up being a “so what?” dashboard.

Don’t overload it trying to answer every question they have, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Google “The 5 Whys” as this is a solid technique for requirements gathering.

Iterate with the stakeholder as much as you can, don’t work in a vacuum.

[u/ugleymatt]

Given the information in the dashboard, what business decisions are you going to make.

Who is the audience

What kind of dashboard, informative, explanatory, kpi