Introducing Spotlight: Metrics-first BI

Today we’re launching Spotlight, the simplest way to discover and visualize your key metrics.

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One of the biggest barriers to exploring data is knowing where to start. For example, to calculate revenue we might need to search orders data, transaction data and receipts. This is because traditional BI tools are always “tables-first”. They require us to know the relevant tables before we can even begin answering our question. Which is very logical, if you’re a data engineer. But tables are how data is stored, it is not how data should be consumed. In reality, when we talk about our business, we talk and plan in metrics, not tables.

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Spotlight is the place for your whole team to discover company metrics without having to search through endless spreadsheets or data warehouses. And once you’ve found a metric in Spotlight, you can can get a detailed analysis with one click. Spotlight is designed to be your starting point for BI.

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Metrics-first not tables-first

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Metrics-first turns BI on it’s head. To explore revenue, all we need is the “revenue” metric; no need to search through tables and no data skills needed. We’ve created Spotlight to make it much easier to find metrics (such as revenue) and get all the answers you need.

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Discover metrics
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Go to Browse > Metrics Catalog in Lightdash to see your most important KPIs in a single view, allowing you to easily discover relevant metrics for your team and role. Metrics are tagged, categorised and ranked by importance to help you find what you need. You can also jump into related charts/dashboards for each metric, so you can find answers without starting from scratch.

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Explore metrics

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Spotlight is for everybody, you don’t have to be a power user to create insightful charts.  Just hit Explore on any metric in the catalog to jump into a new visual-experience for exploring data. From here, you can drill into metric performance over time and slice the metric by different fields.

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Some of the most interesting data questions are notoriously difficult to answer in existing BI tools. For example: what if we want to compare sales to last holiday season? The metrics explorer makes it easy to compare across periods and across metrics. So you can easily see marketing, sales, and finance data together on a single chart and compare performance to last quarter.

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With Lightdash, we’ve seen thousands of users interacting with data, Spotlight is a new experience built around how most people “think about” data and rather than the mechanics, making it both simpler and more powerful.

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Data-team: this one’s for you

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Spotlight is the next step in our journey to create a true self-serve data experience. If we can’t empower our colleagues to use BI tools without data skills, then it’ll always fallback to the data team to build dashboards for every possible question. Our mission at Lightdash is to 10x the data team, and create leverage where it matters. We built Spotlight so you can help your team win with data.

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Spotlight is available now for all Lightdash Cloud customers - book a 1:1 setup call with the Spotlight team so you can get the most out of our latest features https://calendly.com/lightdash-cloud/talk

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What’s next?

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Here’s a sneak peek at 2 big upcoming releases around spotlight:

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Metric Trees are a powerful new way to organise your metrics. Metric trees in Spotlight will allow you to go beyond asking “how much revenue?” to asking “why did the revenue change?”. More to come

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Our AI Analyst is coming to Spotlight to allow you to start asking questions directly from slack and finding relevant metrics quicker than ever.

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