Notes from the Power BI User Days 2026
At the Power BI Gebruikersdagen 2026 I attended several sessions on modelling, governance, AI and the evolution of the Power BI platform. In this series I share a few notes and observations that stayed with me. This page is about starting small.
The myth of the large data team
A recurring pattern at the User Days: organisations that wait until everything is ready before they begin — waiting for a data engineer, a data lake, a central team to design the architecture. Meanwhile, nobody does anything useful with the data that already exists.
Multiple speakers made the same observation: the organisations that are furthest along now did not start with the best infrastructure. They just started.
What starting small actually means
Starting small is not an excuse for sloppy work. It means: begin with a concrete question, choose a limited scope, deliver something useful, learn from it and repeat. That requires a willingness to build something that will be improved later, rather than a mindset of “we do it properly or we do not do it at all”.
- One dashboard for one team
- One data source, correctly modelled
- One question the organisation genuinely wants answered
That is a better starting point than an architect spending six months on a design nobody has seen yet.
The danger of overengineering
Starting small is also a counterweight to overengineering. The temptation is strong to design a perfectly scalable architecture from day one: a medallion architecture, a central semantic layer, deployment pipelines from the start. But that architecture is at its best when it grows from real experience with real questions from real users.
If you start with complexity, you are building infrastructure for problems you do not yet have. If you start with a concrete report, you quickly understand which problems you will actually encounter.
Understanding as a foundation
There is another reason to start small: understanding. When you start small, the people using the report also understand what is in it — they know where the data comes from and understand what the measures mean. That trust is hard to build if you start with twenty pages and a hundred KPIs.
A report that answers three questions well is used more often than a dashboard that tries to show everything.
Reflection
Starting small is not a lack of ambition. It is a way to learn quickly and deliver value faster — and almost always a better strategy than waiting until everything is perfect.
This is also the approach I take when working with teams: first understand what is going on, then figure out together what a meaningful first step looks like. Get in touch if you want to explore what that might look like for your organisation.
The other topics in this series are on the overview page.