How I Freed Up 10 Developer Hours a Week by Rebuilding Reporting
I rebuilt reporting so the team could see live data without waiting on the lead developer to write custom queries every time someone needed an answer.
Situation
A growing technology company with about ten employees had only one lead developer, and every time the business needed a report, support metrics, inventory status, sales performance, or other internal visibility, that developer had to stop building features and write a custom query instead. Some of the requests were complex, and over the course of the engagement that reporting work was consuming a large amount of time from the only developer on the team.
Approach
I remapped where the data lived, pulled the necessary information out of the different databases, and fed it into a cleaned-up reporting database. I then connected Metabase and built multiple views and dashboards so users across the company could access live information without asking engineering for a new query each time. The data updated every hour, and the dashboards tracked both individual and team performance across different verticals of the company.
Result
The company no longer needed to wait on custom reports just to understand what was happening. People could access more relevant information in a more timely way, make decisions on the spot, and explore live dashboards without blocking engineering. The lead developer got back about 10 hours a week that had previously been spent generating reports instead of building the systems the company actually needed.
What was the company using before?
Everything was done through custom queries written by the lead developer on request. There was no self-serve reporting layer, so every time someone needed data they had to wait on engineering.
How long did the reporting rebuild take?
About three weeks from audit to live dashboards. The first week went into mapping where the data actually lived and what needed to be normalized. The second week was the cleaned-up reporting database and Metabase connection. The third week was building the dashboards and views different teams needed.
Does this require a developer to maintain?
Not for day-to-day reporting use. That was the whole point. Once the data pipeline and Metabase are set up, business users can filter, explore, and create views without writing queries or touching the underlying database.
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