How the Tableau Community accelerated the Seahawks’ analytics director’s data journey

Paimon Jaberi was first introduced to Tableau during an internship. The ease of use and the way the tool helped communicate data stories effectively got him curious to learn more. Fast forward five years and Paimon is now the Director of Business Strategy and Analytics for the Seattle Seahawks. 

When we asked Paimon to share more on his data journey, the Tableau Community kept coming up. From the beginning, the Tableau Forums—a place to share your Tableau challenges and get answers from community experts—really helped accelerate Paimon’s Tableau skills, and now as a project owner evaluating new software for his team, he uses the Tableau Community as a barometer for adoption. Hear from Paimon about how Tableau and the resources from the Community have impacted his career.

Let’s start with the Tableau Forums—you’ve mentioned that this online community helped you improve your data skills early on. Can you share more on that?

Anytime I found myself stuck, especially early on climbing the learning curve—the Tableau Forums provided a great resource for troubleshooting problems and finding creative solutions. My usual first fail-safe when I run into a problem is to search the web for any solutions—finding the forums early on was awesome.

Do you still use the Forums when you and your team are working on projects? 

Sometimes, when we can’t figure out how to do what we have wireframed or visualized in our heads, we’ll check out the Forums to see if there is any insight into how we can accomplish what we are after. I’ve learned a lot of foundational visuals we use in our business from the forums over the years.

Aside from being an active Forums user, what other parts of the Tableau Community are you involved in?

I think the Sports and Entertainment Tableau User Group is great. Looking forward to hopefully presenting sometime in the future. In the past (pre-COVID), I really enjoyed the in-person Seattle Tableau User Group events. I learned a ton from some of the sessions, and the happy hours were awesome networking opportunities.

You’ve mentioned in an interview that you use the Tableau Community as the gold standard when evaluating other business tools. Why is an engaged community important for an enterprise tool?

The Tableau Community is all so robust–there is so much information about the product, use cases, and resources easily available for people working in the data space. Whenever I am evaluating a new software or product for us to use, I start off with general research. This often takes me to the product’s forums, other forums, reviews from who is using the product, etc. I then think back to Tableau as a benchmark and reference point in these areas when evaluating other solutions.

What advice would you give other data teams looking to foster the spirit of the Tableau Community?

Passion projects are great. Ideally, it's data from a business priority in your job, other data available within the organization, or something found on your own. Working with data you are interested in and passionate about can be a great fostering experience that emulates the spirit of the Tableau Community, while also being a great exercise for skill development 

What can you share with other teams looking to become a more data-driven organization?

When it comes to Tableau specifically—formatting, formatting, formatting. Be consistent, clean, clear, and on-brand. Although it takes extra effort and customization (which is great what Tableau allows you to do in this sense), put in the extra effort and keep a high standard for the production dashboards and client/customer-facing Tableau solutions. I believe this helps greatly with data familiarity, buy-in, etc. across organizations. This has been key for us as we work towards creating a “one source of the truth” across business verticals in our organization.

Lastly, here’s a fun one! With sports and fitness being such a favorite data viz topic within the Tableau Community—what is a Sports related viz on Tableau Public you’re super inspired by?

I’ve seen so many great ones out there over the years it’s hard to pick one. I’ve always enjoyed checking out the Tableau Public’s Viz of the Day and following #SportsVizSunday. The Iron Viz competition at Tableau Conference has always been inspiring and cool too.

Learn more about how Tableau is an integral part of the Seattle Seahawks’ business strategy. 

To create a Tableau Forums account and get answers from the Tableau Community, start here. Then, go one step further and connect with like-minded data rock stars near you with Tableau User Group meetups.