From dashboards to data products: how dbt transforms analytics teams
An internal audit found 433 Power BI reports at Compare the Market, 179 of them abandoned. Here's how the team rebuilt around dbt models instead of one-off dashboards.
Overview
Explores evolving beyond "reporting factories" where SQL logic duplicates and trust erodes. This session covers building a testing culture, scaling ownership through multi-repo architectures, and shifting toward data-as-a-product as the foundation for AI and agentic workflows.
What you'll take away
- 01
AI does not validate the data it consumes, it trusts it, so a shaky data foundation doesn't get exposed by an AI layer on top, it gets amplified by it.
- 02
More dashboards won't fix a reporting factory, because the problem is the operating model. After 41% of its Power BI reports turned out to be abandoned, Compare the Market switched from shipping dashboards to shipping governed dbt models that each business domain owns.
- 03
The results after moving from a "reporting factory" to governed models: report delivery dropped from three-to-six weeks to under one week, test coverage passed 75%, and model reuse climbed to 3.0x.
Session speaker
Emanuela Ciotti
Compare the Market