A conversation with the Flerlage Twins

Identical twins Ken and Kevin are known for their amazing Tableau chops (they are Tableau Visionaries and Tableau Public Ambassadors), and also for their generous contributions to the data viz community through their posts and advice.

What sparked your interest in data visualization? Were your paths to dataviz similar?

Ken: I’ve worked in Information Technology for nearly 25 years. I started out as a developer but then got into systems and database administration. In 2013, I was given an opportunity to build an analytics team within my organization and I eagerly jumped on it. I quickly realized that analytics was what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. A few years later, I switched jobs and started learning Tableau and absolutely fell in love with it. I remember, in my developer days, that I’d see fellow devs going home and building programs for fun and I always thought they were nuts, but once I started learning Tableau, that’s exactly what I started doing. It’s not just a job but a hobby. What I love most about it is that it satisfies not only my STEM interests but also my natural curiosity and creativity.

Kevin: I had been in analytics for quite some time…I always say that I was doing the “grinding it out in Excel” kind of analytics. At this time, Ken had been using Tableau for a couple of years and had just been selected as one of 30 or so Tableau Zen Masters in the WORLD! I thought it was cool but didn’t quite get it. He had mentioned showing me how to use it, but I just wasn’t interested. 

A few months later, I started feeling unsatisfied in my job and started looking for other analytics positions within my company (I worked for a very large company at the time). There were a ton of listings and 95% of them required experience with Tableau. This is when I finally relented and asked Ken to show me a few things. I fell IN LOVE with it and am still in love with it today.

Ken: Pretty soon after Kevin got started with Tableau, I encouraged him to share some of his ideas on a blog, which led to him creating his own amazing blog. After a year or so, we found that people could remember that a certain blog was written by one of “The Flerlage Twins”, but could never quite remember which one. At that point, we decided to just merge our blogs into one! 

Also worth mentioning is that it didn’t take Kevin long before he was also a Tableau Zen Master!

Hear about upcoming conversations:

Are you competitive with each other?

Ha. During our Tableau Conference 2019 presentation, Ken noted that we’re often asked this same question and emphatically answered, “no…we’re not competitive at all”, then Kevin showed this on the big screen:

We also talked about this in our TC22 presentation, which was the first time that we presented together, in front of a live audience, since TC19 (stupid COVID).

So what do you think? Are we competitive? ;)

How do you each balance time for work, family, and involvement in the dataviz community?

Family comes first, then work, then the data viz community. Our kids are teens (we each have a boy and a girl and Ken’s are a little older than Kevin’s). Since they were little, all of them have played sports–soccer, volleyball, tennis, swimming, etc. So we have always spent a lot of time waiting for them at practices or other events. So what better way to spend that time than building a data visualization or writing a blog? Over the years, we’ve both gotten so much of our community work done during these practice times. 

We should also note that the Tableau Community was the number one reason for our rapid growth within the tool. People underestimate how powerful learning from the community can be. We won’t go into too much detail about this because we thought it was so important, that Kevin wrote a whole blog post about it: Why & How to Connect with the Tableau Community

How has the Tableau scene changed and grown since you both entered it?

Well, people always change and the functionality always improves. Today, we couldn’t imagine a world without parameter actions or collapsible containers, but they didn’t exist for the first 10 years. Design skills have improved exponentially in the past couple of years as well. People like Wendy Shijia and Pradeep Kumar have taken design to the next level. We also see so many more people blogging and creating videos regarding their processes, how to create different charts, or providing tips and tricks.

And, in our opinion, this community is the most amazing thing about the Tableau scene. While some of the people have changed, the spirit remains the same. (Kevin Speaking…But most importantly, I passed Ken in the number of Tableau Public favorites! :)

What’s the next software or technology you’re excited about?

Ken: From a work perspective, I’m really thinking more and more about how we integrate things like machine learning and artificial intelligence into our work. Not just from a standpoint of building models ourselves, but leveraging software and services that embed these technologies and methods into their platforms. This has the potential to have a huge impact on our organizations, not only by providing predictive/prescriptive modeling but by adding additional automation to our everyday work.

From a personal standpoint, I’ve recently started tinkering with Midjourney, a service that uses AI to generate images based on a prompt. For example, I love Japanese-style paintings such as the works of Hokusai, so I asked Midjourney for a Japanese-style painting of a lotus flower and got this lovely image.

Of course, there’s a bit more to the prompts than this as there are any number of different ways to provide specific instructions on how the image should be created, but you get the idea. I’ve quickly become addicted to this amazing tool and am hoping to eventually create some canvas prints of the images to decorate my office at work. 

I just love that tools like this can allow you to create art based purely on your own imagination!

At your job or in the community, what concepts do you find most difficult to explain about your work?

People often see an insightful or beautiful data visualization and don’t realize how much work has gone into producing it. Data viz is the product that comes at the very end of a very long workflow. This workflow generally starts with deep conversations with constituents about the questions they’re trying to answer, their goals, their business processes, etc. It then moves on to identifying what data is needed, acquiring that data (or maybe even building the mechanisms to start collecting it), bringing the data together, and transforming it in a way that makes it easier to visualize. This “data plumbing” takes a lot of time, requires some very specialized skills, and doesn’t often get the attention it deserves.

When we talk to people about data viz, this is something we always mention because it’s easy to just look at the end result and think that we make pretty data visualizations all day. Those visualizations are the end goal because they are what lead to the insights that help lead to better decisions, but creating them requires a lot more work than people generally understand.

What are your tips for upskilling without getting overwhelmed when starting from scratch with a complex tool? (Like Tableau)

We just so happen to have a blog post for that! Our blog, 4 Tips for Mastering Tableau, details the four key things people should do to master Tableau: Train, Practice, Engage, and Teach. These are the path we followed (and continue to follow) with Tableau and we’ve found that these steps are applicable to just about any new tool or software.

Of course, one thing that truly differentiates Tableau from most other tools/software is the community. This is becoming a bit of a theme in our answers because it’s been so critical to our development and has allowed us to increase our skills at an exponential rate. While we’d argue that the Tableau Community is the best tech community we’ve ever taken part in, other tools have similar ones which can really help you to learn and grow.

To learn more about the Flerlage Twins, visit Flerlagetwins.com.