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"I've been the person over-explaining a chart to a room of execs who stopped listening, and I've been the exec flipping to slide 12 trying to find the point. After 20 years leading technical and customer-facing teams at SaaS companies, I've landed on three principles that changed how I communicate with data: Start with the end, not the beginning Create visualizations that don't make the viewer think Ruthlessly edit (the appendix is your friend) I'll walk through before-and-after examples, showing how to get to the point and not lose your audience"
I've been the person over-explaining a chart to a room of execs who stopped listening, and I've been the exec flipping to slide 12 trying to find the point. After 20 years leading technical and customer-facing teams at SaaS companies, I've landed on three principles that changed how I communicate with data: Start with the end, not the beginning Create visualizations that don't make the viewer think Ruthlessly edit (the appendix is your friend) I'll walk through before-and-after examples, showing how to get to the point and not lose your audience
Cynthia Balusek is VP of Success Engineering at Metabase, where she leads success engineering, support, and customer success for one of the most widely adopted open-source analytics platforms in the world. Over a 20+ year career in SaaS, Cynthia has led organizations spanning professional services, customer success, data engineering, and retention at companies including Revionics, Civitas Learning, Bigcommerce, OutboundEngine, and Blackbaud. A common thread across her career has been translating messy operational data into clear narratives that drive executive action — whether making the case to overhaul a support tooling stack, presenting churn analysis to a CEO, or aligning a board around a new operating model. She specializes in helping leadership teams see what the data is actually telling them, even when the story is uncomfortable. Cynthia is a certified PMP and Disciplined Agile Scrum Master, and holds an MBA from Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. She lives in Austin, TX.
