- Macro
- Dashboards
- Data products
When I think about a macro dashboard, I start with the user question rather than the data source. Usually the question is some version of: what changed, how unusual is this configuration, and where have we seen something similar before?
That leads to a few product requirements:
- source attribution and freshness should be visible
- historical comparison should be first-class
- summaries should be descriptive, not advisory
- users should understand which data points lag and which update quickly
The interesting engineering work is often around joins, revisions, and time alignment rather than visualization itself. If those are wrong, even a beautiful chart becomes misleading.
A good macro dashboard earns trust by being careful with language and transparent with context.
What current data sources make possible
Public-data products are better than they used to be because the underlying official series are easy to access and fairly stable. That means a useful macro dashboard can spend more of its energy on framing and comparison logic rather than on fragile scraping or questionable secondary data.
Further reading: