Wednesday, March 26, 2025
This past March, I had the pleasure of speaking at my 4th Domopalooza and I am so grateful. In fact, I saw my first Domopalooza in 2017 and it was truly transformational. For this past Domopalooza, my topic was "Become a Domo Top Chef: My top Domo & Kitchen Hacks to keep things Fast, Clean & Fun." My intention wasn't to show ground breaking ideas, but rather to show quick wins and to help people understand their Domo Kitchen.
If you know the show The Bear, one of the best episodes is called "Forks" and Richie is sent to a fine dining Michelin restaurant to learn what it means to be obsessed with restaurant life. That restaurant (Ever) is in Chicago and I happened to get a behind the scenes tour of the kitchen. The photo up above is of an expeditor. Now, if you don't know what an expeditor is, an expeditor oversees the entire kitchen and has to call out what each chef makes and tells which chefs to take a pause because maybe a guest is in the washroom or hasn't finished their next plate.
Now, I'd like you to think about your Domo instance as a giant kitchen. These are my questions for you
If you're interested in watching my full presentation, you can watch it all here. I won't go over everything, but the main themes are speed hacks, cleaning hacks and fun hacks. In my presentation, I showed how don't have to go harder to move faster - you can also reduce friction as a way to improve speed. What I mean by that is doing little things to help your chefs and analysts do their job easier. For instance, if you highlight two or more ETL tiles, you can choose "copy to clipboard" and paste those steps in any ETL in any instance. Furthermore, utilize importing full dashboard pages and app pages in app studio to make your life easier instead of recreating pages from scratch.
For cleaning hacks, there are small tricks we can do to make sure we keep a clean work station. For example, in SQL instead of saying something "is" try saying where a cell "contains" the word. Additionally, I make ALL of my text columns UPPERCASED so I don't have to worry about case sensitivity. Moreover, with cards, my philosophy is that if you are showing a number on a bar chart or line chart, there is no need for gridlines. Gridlines help your eyes see the number, but if you're showing that number, then there is no point. Use whitespace and real estate to make your cards more visually appealing. Also, on cards I don't label axis if I don't have to because I would have already done so in the title of the card.
If you're interested in seeing my kitchen hacks, I suggest you watch the full video where I go over how to peel garlic faster, cut a bell pepper without any seeds touching the cutting board and how to extract the most juice from a lime.
This is how I keep tabs on my Domo instance as well as the Domo instance for each of my clients. This is my internal audit/ expeditor dashboard and it allows me to see not only credits, rows, users and date of contract renewal, but also which specific datasets and ETLs are costing me the most credits. I had a client that purchased up to 250M rows of data in Domo. They had 500M and were going to be hit with an overage charge. So I setup this dashboard and then we had an hour long call. After that hour, we were able to drop the row count to 146M.
Additionally, I can pinpoint problematic ETLs in literally seconds. I made a view that shows me which ETLs produce the most cards so that way I know that if that ETL goes down, which cards go down. For instance, I had one client who had a massive ETL. It looked like the multiverse splitting off in the show Loki. There were so many lines all over the place and it powered 496 cards. I asked "Hey if I change one column from Impression to Impressions in a Select Columns, what happens?" We did it and everything turned red. I told the CEO "This ETL is too fragile. If one little thing breaks, that's 500 cards that go down. We need to break these into smaller ETLs". Additionally, another MajorDomo is very very good at Domo and runs a tight ship. However, even he didn't know that there were 50 ETLs all called "New ETL Transform" in his instance until I showed him. That was all possible thanks to my Internal Audit Dashboard.
Moreover, if what I'm creating isn't being looked at, then I don't want to maintain it. I have a view that shows me which Dashboards and Apps get the most views. I made this because when I was using Domo at one of my old companies, the VP of marketing told me he wanted each department to have a Domo Dashboard. So I spent hours and hours with each team. Then one day I told him "I have news for you. That team that has been so difficult - has never looked at the Dashboard - I can see activity". Having that view allowed me to double on teams that wanted to actually use my Domo skills and forget those that were wasting my time.
Finally, with my expeditor Dashboard, I'm able to see who has never logged int to my Domo instance. I can also adjust a a dial to see how many people have logged into my Domo in the last 30, 60, 90, 120, etc days so that I can distributed licenses accordingly.
As always, I had a live cooking demo on stage. For this session, I had my friends Jani Rad, Ashley Pennewell and Noah Finberg all come up. Jani was in charge of peeling garlic, Ashley was in charge of cutting a bell pepper and Noah had to cut and juice a lime - he was terrible and I was afraid he was going to cut himself...so normal day for Noah in the kitchen.
Your job at Domopalooza is just to be inspired. One idea, whether big or small, can save your organization so much time or create so much value that it overshadows the cost of a Domopalooza ticket. For instance, it's so easy for us to say "it only takes me 5 minutes", but 5 min a day x 5 work days in a week x 4 weeks in a month x 12 months = 1200 minutes. 1200 minutes divided by 60 minutes per hour is 20 hours. One idea can literally save you 20 hours. So whether it be AI or even small ideas like I showed, my hope for you all is to be inspired and apply that inspiration to your team.
Here's my personal story of Domopalooza and inspiration. When I attended my first Domopalooza in 2017, I saw this guy named Brent Dykes deliver a presentation called "Stories Beats Statistics" and the room was packed. He was so good and he inspired me to really double down on Domo. Now I have finished my 4th Domopalooza and had the pleasure of inspiring so many others.
As a thank you, I'd like to give you all some free stuff:
Thank you for giving me your time and good luck on your Domo journey. I would love to be your guide.
Let me be your Domo guide and teach you how to be a Domo Masterchef like me! In my courses, you'll learn a quick overview of how to use Domo, all ETL functions, intro to SQL and you will make several dashboards along with me!
My goal is to make you the me of your organization so you can not only help your organization grow, but also so your peers and teammates can see the value you bring as a Data Person.
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