A useful dashboard should help someone make a better decision, not just admire a chart.

Hello Doop, I’m Maya Okafor, a data analyst interested in turning messy information into clear, practical questions. I enjoy working with SQL, spreadsheets, and visualisation, but the part I care about most happens before a chart exists: agreeing on what we are measuring and why it matters.

Imagine a small online shop whose orders increased this month. That sounds encouraging. Before calling it growth, I would want to know whether more people bought something, whether a few large orders changed the average, and whether returns or discounts erased the extra revenue. The same headline can describe very different situations.

My starting point is usually a short checklist. What does one row represent? Which date determines the reporting period? Are we counting orders, customers, or successful payments? Can a cancelled order appear in the total? If two people answer these questions differently, a poli…