Reflections on Being Selected as a 2026 Tableau Ambassador

Three hundred fifty-seven people. Forty-eight countries. Four global regions.

I’m one of them. Tableau announced the 2026 cohort today, and I’ve been named a Tableau Ambassador for the 2026-2027 term. I want to stay on that number for a second before I say anything else, because the number is where the reflection starts.

Somewhere in that count are people whose vizzes I studied before I knew how to build one, whose blog posts taught me things I now teach other people, and whose names I said out loud in rooms before I ever met them. I’m on a list with them. Eight years after my first Nashville meetup, that still gets me.

What I keep coming back to isn’t whether I belong on the list. It’s how far the list is from where I started, and how little of that distance I covered by myself.

2018

That’s where the Tableau part of this begins. Charlie Bryan brought the platform into our organization, and Daryle Dowell gave me the thing that actually mattered, which was permission to fail forward and enough room to figure the tool out badly before I figured it out well. I don’t think people appreciate how rare that second one is. Most environments will let you learn as long as you never look like you’re learning.

Then I found the Nashville Tableau community and started going to every meetup I could get to. Jim Dehner was patient with me through a stretch of newbie questions that I’m certain he’d answered a hundred times before, and he never once made it feel that way.

Later that year I walked into Tableau Conference in New Orleans with no real sense of what I was walking into. Tableau had rented the Superdome. I stood in it and understood for the first time that this wasn’t a Nashville thing or a company thing, it was a global thing, and I had somehow already been standing inside the edge of it for months.

My first real presentation came at the Nashville Tableau User Group. Speaking more was already a goal of mine, and the DataFam is where I got to be bad at it in front of people who wanted me to get better.

The hinge

Chantilly Jaggernauth became a mentor and then family. During COVID she started pulling me into speaking opportunities that put me in front of the broader community, and almost everything public I do now runs back through that stretch. Tableau named me a featured author in 2020, two years after I’d first opened the product, and I’m still in touch with people from that cohort.

Then came London, 2024, DataFam Europe. My wife Kim was in the room and so was Chantilly. I grew up in a place where nobody’s career took them across an ocean to talk about anything, let alone data, and I spent part of that trip half-convinced someone was going to check my badge again at the door. That’s the moment I’d point to if someone asked what the community gave me. Not the stage. The fact that two of the people who put me on it were sitting there watching.

The year I sat one out

Here’s the part I’d rather skip.

Four years running I was at Tableau Conference, speaking, hosting, showing up. In 2026 I’d been selected again, session on the calendar, printed in the program. I didn’t go. We were prepping the old house for market, we’d just moved into the new one, and my family had a reunion in South Carolina that had been on the calendar longer than the conference had.

I could have made it work on paper. Fly to San Diego, speak, fly back, repack, fly to South Carolina. I’d have arrived at both places running on fumes and been fully present at neither. So I sat in a chair in South Carolina next to my uncle watching my cousins fry fish, and my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I didn’t check it.

Some people assumed something was wrong. Nothing was wrong. But I want to be straight about what it cost, because a gratitude post that only lists the good years isn’t worth much. That was a stage I didn’t stand on, a room I wasn’t in, and a set of conversations that happened without me. Alyssa Jenson at Tableau handled it with more grace than she owed me, and I noticed.

I’d make the same call again. It still counts as an absence, and I know it.

What the badge actually measures

Not technical ceiling. The program’s stated criteria are leading and evangelizing with kindness and respect, nurturing other people’s creative and technical growth, and being accessible enough that someone newer feels safe asking a question they think is dumb.

The work behind that language is more concrete. Ambassadors answer questions, publish, lead and speak at user groups, teach the APIs, and share design practice. This cohort beta-tested Auto Semantic Modeling in Tableau Next and Composable Data Sources in Cloud and Server, sat in the focus groups that shaped Tableau Conference and Dreamforce, and ran sessions, meetups, and the hackathon at TC26, where all three Iron Viz finalists came out of the group.

Two things in the fine print are worth knowing if you’ve never applied.

The first is that nothing rolls over. Returning Ambassadors go back through the process every single year. It isn’t automatic, and I got in this cycle on a nomination rather than anything I submitted myself, which I’m still sitting with. Whoever put my name in, I owe you one.

The second is that internal contributions inside your own company don’t count. Whatever I build for a client, however good it is, is invisible to this process. Only what I gave to the community counts, and that is exactly the right way to draw the line.

Which is why the badge isn’t a popularity contest and isn’t a skill assessment. It’s accumulated evidence that you spent your time on other people, reassessed from scratch every twelve months.

The utility knife question

I co-organize the Nashville Power BI User Group and I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer. I’m also a Databricks Certified Data Analyst Associate, I’ve been recognized by the Snowflake Squad, and I’ve spent a good part of this year in Sigma and Fabric.

So I asked myself the question before anyone else could. Am I still a Tableau person, or someone who used to be one and kept the badge?

The question has a bad premise. I’m a utility knife, and I’ve been one for years.

I don’t pick sides. I pick what’s available for the organization I’m helping. A health system eight years into Tableau with a bench of analysts who know it cold doesn’t need me arriving with a migration deck. It needs someone who can push that platform further than they’ve pushed it, because Tableau in the hands of a team that knows it is still one of the best analytical experiences in this industry. A company that just landed on Snowflake and is deciding whether Sigma or Power BI sits on top of it needs someone who has built in both and will say which one fits their team, not which one I enjoy more. Neither of those conversations is about a logo. They’re about a warehouse, a semantic layer, a governance model, and the people who have to keep the thing running after I leave.

What carries across all of it is smaller than people expect and harder than they want it to be. SQL. Knowing how a model should be shaped before you drag anything onto a canvas. Sitting with a stakeholder who can’t articulate the question yet. Every platform on that list rewards those three things and none of them will cover for you if you skip them.

Power BI was my first love because I found it first. Tableau would have been if the order had been reversed. Nothing is pulling me away from either one.

Thank you

God, who has been consistent with me through seasons where I was not consistent with Him. I didn’t build any of this alone and I’m not confused about that.

Kim and Kins, who absorb the travel and the late nights and the stretches where I’m at the table and mentally inside a semantic model.

My Lovelytics family, all of you, from a stretch working alongside Chantilly on a team named Tableau Partner of the Year. That’s where I learned this platform from the product side and the sales side at once, and the foundation is a straight line to what we do at Royal Blue Analytics now. You know it’s nothing but love every time I see you.

The Nashville Tableau community, and the DataFam globally, for a culture that hands things to people instead of guarding them.

The team at Royal Blue Analytics, because the version of me that gets to show up for the community only exists because we cover for each other on the work that pays.

What I’m carrying into the term

The thing I keep turning over is scale. In 2018 I was one person going to every Nashville meetup I could find because I wanted to be around people who cared about this. The version of that now is 357 people across 48 countries, and most of them I’ll never meet.

The work is the same work, aimed wider. Keep the Nashville rooms full. Keep testing features myself before I write about them and saying plainly when they don’t do what the announcement claimed. Keep being reachable to whoever is currently where I was in 2018, when asking a stranger a question felt like an imposition.

Charlie gave me a platform. Daryle gave me permission. Jim gave me patience. Chantilly gave me a stage. None of them were keeping score, and none of them needed me to earn it first. I’d like to be that for somebody this year, and I’d like to do it in a year where I also show up in San Diego.

The full list is at tableau.com. Go find someone on it you haven’t met.