Marcus's Compromise Dashboard — Chapter 2 Worked Example ============================================================== The two-audience compromise-dashboard scenario from Chapter 2 of The Defensible Decision. Six visuals on one page that fail both audiences, alongside the two-BRD alternative: one small chart per audience, each answering its audience's specific decision question. Wholly synthetic. Any resemblance to a specific real sales-ops dashboard is coincidental; the pattern is drawn from the recurring practitioner failure mode Chapter 2 catalogues. Files ----- - marcus-compromise.csv — flat rows: six compromise-page visuals + two two-BRD solution rows - marcus-compromise.json — canonical scenario contract with source hash What it represents ------------------ The Page 1 Marcus would build if he tried to serve the VP of Cloud Sales Operations and the regional directors from one merged BRD. The compromise has six technically-correct visuals (a card, a line, three bars, a table, a treemap) that together fail both audiences: the VP cannot identify three defund candidates from the page, the regional director cannot identify two products to push in NA-East. The two-BRD alternative pairs one purpose-built chart per audience, each answering its audience's specific question in a defined read-time. Invariants (locked) ------------------- The scenario carries executable invariants that Chapter 2's release contract enforces: - Compromise dashboard: exactly six visuals, IDs 1..6 with no gaps. - Visual kinds span at least four distinct chart families (card, line, bar, table, treemap) — the failure mode is not a single-encoding-choice bug. - Neither audience's decision question is answerable from the compromise page (vp_outcome and director_outcome both record the recovery step the audience is forced to take). - Two-BRD solution has exactly two charts, one per audience. - Each solution chart names its audience, its decision, and its chart-shape rationale. - Read-time budgets are specified per solution chart (90 seconds for the VP chart, 150 seconds for the director chart), tying the audience discipline back to Chapter 5's read-time framing. Why the invariants matter ------------------------- Chapter 2's pedagogical point is that a merged BRD produces a merged chart that fails both audiences. If the compromise dashboard had fewer visuals, it would look like a rushed job rather than a diligent one; if the two-BRD alternative used identical chart shapes, the comparison would collapse to a re-titling exercise. The scenario is deliberately shaped so the compromise looks like the reasonable-effort dashboard a mid-career analyst would ship, and the two-BRD path looks like the smaller, cheaper, more defensible alternative that pays back the up-front elicitation cost. What it does NOT represent -------------------------- - Actual sales-operations dashboard data from any real company. - Marcus's Page 2 or later pages (the failure is visible on Page 1; the chapter does not extend to a full dashboard tour). - The BRD templates themselves (those live in /appendix-e/ — this dataset only carries the chart-shape decisions the two BRDs would drive). Reproducibility --------------- The dataset ships from the book source at AlexBooks/applied-ai/ai-directed-viz/data/marcus-compromise.json and is re-emitted here by AlexBooks/applied-ai/ai-directed-viz/scripts/generate-marcus-compromise.mjs --site-root . The generator writes the source SHA-256 into marcus-compromise.json so drift between the book and this site is detectable. License ------- Released for teaching use alongside The Defensible Decision. Use freely.