modeling · governance
Grain before glamour: why every dashboard argument starts with the row
2026-01-18 · Nadia Heng
Finance asked for a simple line chart. The warehouse team delivered it quickly. The argument still lasted ninety minutes because nobody had written down the grain on the slide.
In this note we walk through the exact questions we now ask before approving a visual: what counts as an event, how duplicates enter, and which keys survive a join storm.
You will see a before/after narrative from a retail cohort where the headline number moved by four points once the grain matched the business definition.
We end with a one-page checklist you can paste into Confluence so the next review starts with alignment instead of suspicion.