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Chantilly Jaggernauth shows us how to make beautiful Tableau dashboards
535 Plays4 years ago
Chantilly Jaggernauth, Tableau Zen Master and founder of the nonprofit Millennials and Data group visits the PolicyViz Podcast to talk about her work and process.
The post Episode #188: Chantilly Jaggernauth appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and New Year Greetings
00:00:12
Speaker
Happy New Year, everybody. And welcome back to another episode of the Policy Viz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch.
00:00:18
Speaker
I hope you had a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season and are getting ready for what promises to be a much better 2021 than we experienced in 2020. I'm excited to bring you a whole new slate of podcast episodes focusing on all the stuff that I like to talk about, data visualization, presentation skills, and data communication. And I've got a great lineup for you over the next several weeks and months, so I hope you will join me and keep tuning in every other week for the show.
Introduction to 'Better Data Visualizations'
00:00:48
Speaker
Of course, January brings a very exciting milestone in my life. My new book, Better Data Visualizations, is set to hit bookshelves any day now. And I hope you will check it out, grab it from your favorite bookstore, Amazon, my publisher at Columbia University, or wherever gets your books. It is a two year project in the making, and I'm very excited to get it out into the world to help people do a better job visualizing and communicating their data.
Racial Equity in Data Visualizations
00:01:16
Speaker
But
00:01:17
Speaker
On to the podcast. So I've spent a bit of time in the last few episodes talking about how we could do a better job approaching racial and equity work in our data visualizations. We've talked about inequality in algorithms and in our search engines. And I hope you'll go and check out all those podcast episodes from the fall. But today we're going to turn to talking about
00:01:39
Speaker
how to effectively help people learn about data and graphics.
Meet Chantilly Jagranath
00:01:44
Speaker
And to help me do that, I'm very excited to have my friend Chantilly Jagranath on the show with me. Chantilly is a Tableau Zen Master. She is also the founder of a nonprofit group called Millennials in Data, where she helps bridge the data literacy and analytical skills gap with students and also adults.
00:02:02
Speaker
by training and mentoring and preparing people to work in a data-driven environment. She's also a Tableau Zen Master, so in this episode, we talk about her background in Tableau, how she got interested in it, how she took off in her skills, and also how she started the Millennials and Data Project, and also her work on the Tableau Racial Equity Task Force that has recently started up, and I'm excited to see what they come
Chantilly's Journey in Data Visualization
00:02:28
Speaker
out with.
00:02:28
Speaker
So I'm not going to belabor the introduction anymore. Again, Happy New Year. I hope you're all well. So here is my interview, the first podcast of 2021. Here's my chat with Chantilly. Hi, Chantilly. How are you? Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I mean, this is a big thrill, right? Like I get to see you like twice a year.
00:02:52
Speaker
When we get together for watching you teach my Georgetown students how to actually do Tableau, as opposed to having me ruin any potential Tableau skills they could ever have. No, it's always a pleasure having those sessions. It's always a pleasure speaking with you.
00:03:07
Speaker
That's great. I'm so glad we get to get to chat. So you've got a lot going on and some really exciting projects and endeavors. And I also want to talk about how you got into Tableau and what it's like being a Zen master. So maybe we'd start just by having you introduce yourself and talk about your background a little bit and so people can sort of get to know you a little bit.
00:03:27
Speaker
Awesome, for sure. Well, I'm Chantilly Jaganarth. I wear a lot of titles. I would say my full-time title is Vice President of Data Visualization and Training at Lovelytics. Lovelytics is a Tableau partner consulting company based out of Arlington, Virginia. In addition to that, I'm also the CEO and founder of Millennials and Data, which I'll speak more about.
00:03:50
Speaker
We are a nonprofit organization who works to bridge the data literacy gap between millennials and what they're learning in school and kind of what's taking place in the rural world in terms of looking at data. And then I'm also a two-time Tableau Zen master. And my journey into Tableau took place about 10 years ago, actually, when I was a student at Howard University.
00:04:13
Speaker
based out of Washington, D.C. and I had an assignment that was given by my professor and he just said make sense of this data and this data was just so massive.
00:04:24
Speaker
like a million records plus, had no clue that it was that big. I just knew that every time I tried to open it in Excel, it would crash my computer a bunch of times. And I simply just Googled that night, you know, what can analyze large amounts of data? And a Tableau advertisement appeared and I saw that it was free for students and I just downloaded it, knocked out my assignment, presented it to
00:04:48
Speaker
my class the next day and my professor was intrigued and I was intrigued as well that I was able to kind of find some insight in this in this data. So that's really where where my love for Tableau began. Wow. And so from there, once you had the student version, did you take classes or did you just keep playing around with it and just got you know, just built your own skills?
00:05:10
Speaker
So I kept playing around with the tools. So I love to self-teach myself things. I love watching YouTube videos. I'm also very active when I'm learning something. So in addition to watching videos, I'll also be following along with my own
Learning Data Visualization Tools
00:05:27
Speaker
data set. But what was unique about my journey was that at the same time that I was a student, I was working for Johnson & Johnson.
00:05:36
Speaker
at the same time. So it was easy for me to speak with my manager, my advisor at the time and ask them how do they use Tableau or have they heard of Tableau? You know, how does Johnson & Johnson use data analytics? And I was fortunate enough that next summer
00:05:52
Speaker
to actually be placed in a role where I could start to analyze data and see how such a large organization uses data. So I would say me teaching myself and then also having some real world hands-on experience pretty early on assisted me in my journey.
00:06:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So you had mentioned that when you were going through the YouTube videos and looking at the tutorials, you had your own data that you were using. So when you are talking to people, when you're teaching your classes and you're working with clients, you know, you teach your
00:06:27
Speaker
day long class or half day class or four days of class, you know, then they have to go
Community and Mentorship in Data
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Speaker
learn it on their own. So what is your recommendation for people to really learn a tool? Is it go get some data and just go make as much stuff as you can with those data?
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, so I think now data, there are so many sites that have data available, right? When I was starting out like 10 years ago, we didn't have like, I think like data.gov was the main site that you could probably get open source data from, but now there are so many websites that provide you with open source data, data.world, you have Kegel, you still have like all of the .gov sites. There are just so many
00:07:08
Speaker
avenues that you can fetch data from. And I feel as though when you're learning something new, the best way to learn it is to use it
00:07:17
Speaker
in addition to doing something that you love. So for me, I like sports, right? So I would look at sports data or I like, you know, what other types of data sets do I like? I like, I just like random data sets. Like I'm not a particular person that has a passion around it, but that's how some people learn, right? So if you love basketball, right?
00:07:40
Speaker
analyze some basketball data using Tableau. Follow the tutorials and use the data that you like. I think that's how most people learn and catch on to things.
00:07:52
Speaker
So let me ask you this. So 10 years ago, I feel like you could work in any tool, it's Tableau, it's R, it's JavaScript, it's whatever it is. You could work in a tool, you could learn it, you could post something to Twitter or to Tableau Public. And even if it was kind of not great, you would get, some people would give you a hard time, but you basically, I always find I got more constructive feedback than anything.
00:08:18
Speaker
Do you still think that's the case? And if so, like, how should people think about developing their own skills and getting constructive feedback? I think now the community is massive, right? Like, I've stepped away a little bit from the community because of just how much it's grown. So I would say for a newcomer, it's a little difficult to, and a little overwhelming, not difficult, it's a little overwhelming, right? Coming into the new community, but
00:08:48
Speaker
I would say if somebody is really looking for good feedback, what I found for some of the individuals that I work with, the best way to get the best feedback would not be from the community as a whole, but more so from a mentor, right? So I would say for new individuals who are looking to get feedback,
Implementing Tableau Across Departments
00:09:09
Speaker
constructive feedback, because there are so many individuals who are online who
00:09:15
Speaker
could give you good feedback, could give you bad feedback. I think the best feedback might actually come from you finding one or two individuals who are in your circle, who can provide you with constructive feedback. That's the route that I will go personally.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it also sounds like you had a job where they supported your efforts and were interested in potentially utilizing that particular tool within the organization, which I would guess is not the case for a lot of people, well, maybe less people now than 10 years ago.
00:09:48
Speaker
So you're right. One of the things that enabled my journey was that I did have a job that already used the tool, but that was just one role. So at Johnson & Johnson, it's like an organization within an organization. You can move around. You can work for one department who has never heard of Tableau, and then you can go to another department who has everything developed and designed inside of Tableau.
00:10:14
Speaker
So what I found actually was that I would seek out those roles and those positions who did not have Tableau, and I would introduce them to the tool. It would take me about two to three months to talk them into it. And then I would start migrating over those legacy reports that were done
00:10:36
Speaker
in some of those older systems, some were Excel reports, just anything that was done manually, I would transition that over to Tableau. So that was always my challenge. And I felt like once I was able to get an org set up or a department set up, then that would be my success story. And I would kind of move on to finding a new team that I can do that for. So that was like
Tableau Zen Master Program
00:10:59
Speaker
my dream.
00:11:00
Speaker
Right. Did you ever find that you got into a department and introduced the folks there to Tableau and then they would start to start to use it and then people got so good at it that you would start to learn from, you know, start to learn certain things from them that you hadn't even seen before?
00:11:18
Speaker
I wanna say that I would learn things from them. I would learn things that they asked for. So, unfortunately, a lot of the roles that I was in, I was the main developer and I was supporting a lot of leaders and the leaders that I was working for, they were only going into the tool to look for what they wanted, not necessarily to analyze and develop. But I would say that in each of those roles, and even still today, there are requests that I get that I'm like, all right,
00:11:44
Speaker
Give me a day to find that out. So before I used to say, no, Tableau couldn't do that. And then I would say, oh, look, I was able to do it. So I've learned to stop saying, no, it can't do that. And just say, OK, let me find out how to do it inside of Tableau now. So I would say over the course of the 10 years, and even still today, I'm still learning just so much in terms of the things that you can do because of the requests that I get from my key stakeholders.
00:12:12
Speaker
What is, in the newest version of Tableau, what's your favorite new piece of the software that they've added? So my favorite piece is the collapsible container. So this isn't new, new. I think it came out maybe two years ago, but it's something that I use with pretty much every dashboard. So whenever you are transitioning
00:12:39
Speaker
an org or a department or a user from a tabular report to some form of a visualization, and it's multiple people who are looking at it, you're not going to get 100% buy-in, right? So there are still those folks who are going to want to see those tabular reports. And if the goal of the project was to visualize it in a better way,
00:13:01
Speaker
Unfortunately, you're going to get a thumbs down if you don't have a text table on there, right? Some users are expecting for you to redesign a tabular report in Tableau and make it the exact same tabular report. And that's never the case. So the reason that I love the collapsible container so much is because now I satisfy both audiences by having the main visualization take up
00:13:26
Speaker
all of the real estate, but then I use a collapsible container for those text happy individuals so that they can click on that button and the text table will expand and then
Bridging the Data Literacy Gap
00:13:37
Speaker
they can collapse it and they'll see the visualization. Interesting. So you're trying to get all of your potential users. Exactly.
00:13:46
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the Zen Master program and particularly what it was like for you? This is your second time, I think, being a Zen Master. For people who don't know what the program is and what the process is like, if you could explain that for folks. And then also, personally for you, what is it like to be a Zen Master and be recognized as a leader and an expert for that tool and in the field?
00:14:11
Speaker
Awesome. For sure. So a Tableau Zen Master is a leader in the Tableau community who is giving back and who is teaching on their free will. So you have individuals who are very active on the Tableau Forum and
00:14:30
Speaker
they're answering user questions, right? I think our forum, the Tableau Forum is one of the best forums that I've seen out there where any question that you've had, you know, somebody who's always willing to answer. So you have Zen Masters who spend a lot of their free time just answering those questions. You also have some Zen Masters who work with the developers and work to enhance the product, right? All on their free time. You have some Zen Masters who
00:14:57
Speaker
write blogs on, you know, new tips and tricks or new enhancements on Tableau, who's just always, you know, finding ways to give back to the community. You have some Zen masters who are teaching in their own way, whether it's through blog. And then a Zen master like myself, I'm teaching through my nonprofit, Millennials and Data. So
00:15:17
Speaker
I think that's kind of where I got my leg into the program. The program runs every year. It's a nomination on a nomination basis. So they open up nominations once a year and the community nominates you.
00:15:35
Speaker
based on the things that they've seen, you have to fill out a couple of questions, and then internally, Tableau looks at those nominations, and I believe they have a committee who comes up with the final individuals who will make the program, and it lasts for a year. So I became a Zen Master in 2018, I believe, and when I had my conversation with the Tableau team around why I became a Zen Master, it was really because of the work that I was doing with Millennials and Data.
00:16:06
Speaker
Great. So let's turn to millennials and data. So this is a nonprofit that you started. Is it housed or is it's home now in DC or in Philly? So we are virtual. Virtual. Okay. So there's no home. Yeah, there's no home. Home is the love that you guys all feel for one another. We're all virtual.
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah. So can you talk about it? What does it do and what do you hope it can accomplish? Yeah, for sure. So I started millennials and data about two years ago. The idea came three years ago, but I officially launched it two years ago with the intent to make sure that millennials and just other individuals who were around, you know, the college student age
00:16:51
Speaker
had an understanding of how they could use data coming out of college. So I would say that throughout my professional career, what I've learned is that when I was turning over some of these dashboards to leadership, some of the questions that I was getting asked weren't really technical questions about the tool, but more so data literacy questions.
Integrating Data Literacy in Education
00:17:11
Speaker
And there was this talk that started coming about of what is data literacy and how can we close the data literacy gap within the organization. And a lot of companies were
00:17:20
Speaker
outsourcing to figure out how can they start to train their employees internally to be more data literate. And I decided that I wanted to actually assist in this, but more so with my own organization and going to schools and targeting university students and making sure that they had some form of a data literacy education.
00:17:39
Speaker
before they graduated.
Teaching Data Literacy Across Ages
00:17:41
Speaker
So I started this program at Howard University with 10 students who did not have a technical background, meaning they were not majoring in engineering or data analytics, things like that. These were all business students who
00:17:54
Speaker
were measuring in accounting, marketing, finance, some of those fields. And they had zero knowledge of data. They had zero knowledge of Tableau. And the goal was that within 16 weeks, I wanted to make sure that they understood exactly how they can use data within any field that they decided to go into.
00:18:13
Speaker
So I ran the program for 16 weeks. It was a success. Based on the feedback that I got from that program at Howard, I continue to enhance and build upon the curriculum. So I think our first program we just touched on Tableau. But then our second one, we started touching on SQL because if you want to become a data analyst, SQL might be one of the things that
00:18:33
Speaker
They're going to ask you if you if you understand it. So we added SQL to the course. We added live database connections to the course as well. I've expanded the course even to professionals and now I can say that we're wrapping up with our fourth cohort. We run two cohorts every year and we're wrapping up with our fourth cohort.
00:18:52
Speaker
fourth cohort right now, about 20 students in the cohort, 11 or 12 of whom are students. And then we have about seven who are actual professionals who were looking for this training. Wow, that's great. Congratulations. That is incredible. Thank you. So backing, I guess, kind of backing up a little bit. From your perspective, what should
00:19:18
Speaker
universities, colleges, high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, like what should they add to the existing curriculum so that people have more data literacy, more graphic literacy, you know, or better stewards and being able to be, you know, better citizens by understanding data in better ways.
00:19:36
Speaker
I definitely think that there should be like a data 101 course that encompasses visual literacy, like visualization literacy, how to read and interpret your basic chart types and even some intermediate chart types.
00:19:53
Speaker
I also think that the class should touch on from an analyst perspective. If you're given a task from leadership or from a key stakeholder, how do you go about executing that task? How do you use data to execute that task? So I definitely think that at least a data 101 class,
00:20:17
Speaker
is necessary, right? How do you interpret various data types, right? What's the difference between quantitative versus qualitative data? How do you really use y equals mx plus b in the real world, right? Because we learned that in school and I just finished teaching that lesson
00:20:36
Speaker
I just finished teaching that lesson last week to my students. And it's like, all right, remember when you were in grade school, Y equals MX plus B, you know, we just learned this as a, as a equation in math, but we really didn't understand when I didn't understand back then how you could use that in the real world. So just like a linear regression model, things, things like that. So I definitely think that.
00:20:58
Speaker
data 101 class that encompasses the teachings that the students have now, especially in math and things like that, groups all of that information together and shows them how they can be more data literate.
Tableau Community Equity Task Force
00:21:15
Speaker
And where would you put that data 101 class? Is that a post-secondary class or is that somewhere where people are younger?
00:21:23
Speaker
I think it can be in any age group because I've done, I've actually done like a, I wouldn't even call it a data literacy class, but I've done like a data literacy type of mini training at a daycare, right? Where we were using built-in blocks. We were counting, I was asking them questions in the form of like what we would say is a business question in the adult world. And I was asking these little babies these questions and then showing them
00:21:53
Speaker
how they can use their building blocks to answer those questions. And then we were constructing graphs that produced the final answer. So I would say, all right, we have all of these blocks scattered together. What's the first thing that you want to do if you want to know how many red blocks are in here? Obviously, you want to pick out all of the red blocks.
00:22:14
Speaker
blocks now, if you want to tell your mom when you go home, you know how many red blocks you had to play with versus like the green blocks or the blue blocks and make a case for why you all need more like red blocks. You have to make a picture to show her that. So how tall should the red bar be compared to the green bar based on the number of blocks that are available? So I think it can be in any level.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think it should be, or at least expanded for what we have. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was the Tableau Community Equity Task Force, which I know you're a member of, and you already had a few meetings. What is the task force like? What are its goals? Are you meeting every day? How is that experience so far?
00:23:05
Speaker
For sure. So the task force is pretty new. The task force is a part of Tableau's racial justice data initiative. We are 12 members within the community, all different backgrounds, and I think that's what I love the most about it. But we're bringing our own unique perspective to this group so that we can
00:23:28
Speaker
help Tableau understand how we can do better as a community. How can we be more representative as a community, right? We're looking at various entry points into the community and seeing if there's anything that we can do better so that we're making sure that we have equal representation or a good representation really across all of the diversity groups that are in the community. Wow. And so how many people are on the committee?
00:23:57
Speaker
There are 12 of us and we meet on a monthly basis for about an hour. We typically go over because the conversations are just so great. There's more to come. We will have some initiatives rolling out in 2021. Right now we're in the weed of things and trying to establish exactly like the directions and the things that we'll
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:24:20
Speaker
we're going to put a plan and some action behind next year because we're just not another task force that's saying that we're going to do something and things just never change because a lot of companies earlier this year, they were saying that they were going to do certain things when
00:24:37
Speaker
you know certain events were taking place in the United States and what I really like is that with this particular initiative I actually see us putting the the rubber to the road and making sure that we have some some milestones and some things some actionable items that we want to come out of it next year.
00:24:52
Speaker
That's great. That's great. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the work come out of that and see some actionable items. Chantilly, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's always great chatting with you and congrats on all the, all the success you've had. It's great to get to hear about all these initiatives and work that you're doing. Thank you so much for having me.
00:25:13
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you will check out Chantilly's work on her website and the millennials and data site. And I hope you'll join me in being excited about what comes out of the Tableau community equity task force work. Hopefully that will come out soon. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:25:35
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs, audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you would like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad-free and supported by listeners. If you'd like to help support the show financially, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com slash PolicyViz.