The Death of the Dashboard Manager

Front ends on demand are upending an entire profession

Over the past couple of years, much has been discussed about the death of the Front End Developer. Just a few years ago, UX-sensitive engineers could make a living off of creating beautiful and easily usable websites and applications. This is becoming increasingly uncommon as a result of AI. The result is that the percent of developers identifying strictly as ‘Front End’ developers went from 50% in 2020 to just 6% in 2025.

Credit to Grokking the Tech Career for the chart

Something similar will happen in the rest of the white-collar world. Many professionals start off their careers creating data visualizations, historically through Excel, but these days through software like Tableau or Power BI. These are the Dashboard Managers, and they exist across every major industry from sports to CPG to tech. Many executives and other senior decision makers start off their careers as Dashboard Managers.

An obvious major reason for why we’ll start to see these roles disappear is that these visualization tools are now getting very easy to use as a result of AI tools, which will obviate the need for Dashboard Managers in the first place. Tableau, for example, now has its own agent that allows a user to make new visualizations in seconds. Why have Dashboard Managers when PMs and executives can use the software themselves?

Tableau agent makes a soon-to-be-obsolete piece of software easier to use

But there’s another more profound reason: In this new world of ‘Front Ends on Demand’, leading visualization tools like Tableau will themselves become obsolete.

Not only will Dashboard Managers go away, but expensive tools like Tableau (acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for nearly $16B) will soon be unable to justify their price tag. Replacing these tools will be internal systems that build bespoke visualization websites with just a few prompts.

Vibe Visualizing Fortnite UGC Data

I tested what I think will eventually be the future of Dashboard Management using some pretty incredible data from by Epic Games, provided through a recently launched API that provides data on their Creator Islands in Fortnite. For those not in the know, these are custom UGC maps made by players using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

Configuring databases and manipulating the data still took quite a bit of time. It also took a good bit of thinking about what a Fortnite UGC creator would actually want to see. Even for the backend work, AI reduced the time to prepare the data from weeks to just days.

But this was nothing compared to the amount of time it saved me creating the visualizations I wanted once I had the tables I needed.

My approach was simple. I found a React component library online called Tremor (I had never built anything in React before) and copied over a few components that I liked, such as line charts, bar charts, tooltips, and toggles.

I then used Cursor to create my web page:

“Using the components available to you, create a list of charts for each of the various metrics for the most popular islands”.

After a couple iterations, where I added things like data filters, benchmarks, and rolling averages, I ended something very close to what is available here:

(if you’d like to peruse the demo site yourself, go here)

Critics might say that this approach goes out of most Dashboard Managers’ comfort zones, requires extra setup such as web hosting, or that my example visualizations actually look like ass.

These are all valid critiques, but employers will still find it increasingly hard to justify expensive Tableau licenses when you can now simply create these front ends ‘on demand.’

Even if profitable visualization software and the Dashboard Manager eventually go by the wayside, it doesn’t have to mean the end for analytically inclined entry level employees getting their foot in the door.

Though fewer developers now identify themselves strictly as Front End developers, they haven’t actually gone away. Instead, they’ve adapted by turning into fullstack engineers, spending more of their time away from their specialization on other parts of the tech stack.

Similarly, it will be incumbent on the Dashboard Manager to figure out how to adapt and become more of a ‘full stack’ data professional. This will require them to become either more strategy or data-engineering focused (and preferably both). As products like Tableau go toward obsolescence, so too will be employees whose niche is just focused on managing dashboards.