Meet Dean Shaw: The Dashboard Whisperer with a Voice Like Sean Bean

Or, the day I ripped up my interview questions and never looked back.

Charlotte Bailey, CEO

When you interview candidates for a technical role, you usually go in with a plan. A well-rehearsed intro. A few probing questions. Maybe a technical test or two to see how they handle a SQL join under pressure.

That plan lasted precisely four minutes when I first met Dean Shaw.

He strolled in calm as you like — looking for all the world like he could roll out a Panintelligence implementation, rescue a live deployment, and narrate the Yorkshire Tea advert without breaking a sweat.

Think Sean Bean — but with more charts, fewer mugs, and dangerously strong dashboard game.

And I mean that literally. Dean didn’t come with a portfolio — he came with an interactive, fully built Panintelligence dashboard, themed around professional pool statistics and, inexplicably but impressively, tornado data.

I kid you not. Tornadoes. In Yorkshire.

By the time he explained his dynamic chart drilldowns, custom filters, and commentary widgets, I was silently sliding the interview questions into the recycling. The technical test? Cancelled. We were already looking at it.

Since then, Dean’s become a cornerstone of our professional services  team — part technologist, part storyteller, part data therapist. So now, we’re handing the mic over to him to share a bit more about what makes him tick (spoiler: it might involve pool stats!).

Over to you, Dean…

From Pool Hall to Dashboards: By Dean Shaw 

Eyup, I’m Dean — Panintelligence’s most senior Implementation Consultant, not in terms of tenure but in terms of mileage. I’m what you might call a Dashboard Whisperer, part data therapist, part interface wrangler, and one-man SQL support line. If it lives in a database, I’ve probably drilled down into it, themed it, colour-coded it, and added a tooltip. 

By day, I help customers squeeze every ounce of insight from their data — from building dynamic dashboards to CSS tweaks, from SQL wizardry to the dark arts of embedding commentary widgets. I also run our monthly training sessions and help test each new release (that we ship monthly, because we’re gluttons for punishment). 

Before all this, I wore a few different hats. Builder, Butcher, Bookie, Bouncer, Barman — and that’s just jobs that start with B ! I’ve sold cars, shifted stock, managed warehouses and even dabbled in clerical duties. Basically, if there’s a uniform and a till involved, I’ve done it. But my love for technology eventually pulled me in — and the rest, as they say, involved a tornado dashboard and a job offer. 

Outside the Dashboard 

When I’m not elbow-deep in SQL or smoothing out a gnarly filter setup, you’ll likely find me around a pool table. I’ve been playing since I was eight, when my Dad gave me a 6ft table and a few wise words: “Try your best, win with style, and lose with grace.” I’ve played every week since, owned a full-size table for most of my adult life, and even clubbed together with uni mates to buy one for our student house — which may or may not have affected our grades. 

During lockdown, while most people baked banana bread or learned guitar, I decided to build a machine inside a pool table that racks the balls for you. A few of my mates said it couldn’t be done, so naturally I took that as a challenge. Four months, one bench prototype, and a bit of RFID wizardry later, I had a working, coinless, credit-based pool table that’s now racked up over 18,000 games. It might just be the best value table in the world — 12.5p a rack! 

Herding Cats & Building Leagues 

These days, I’ve swapped regular sport for organising it. I’m Secretary of the South Elmsall & Hemsworth Snooker League and captain of the Soldiers ‘C’ team — a role that’s 20% scheduling and 80% herding cats. Under my watch, the league’s emerged from the dark ages: we’ve got a web app for score reporting, a proper database, and a public-facing website complete with league tables and financials (www.sehsl.co.uk).  

Final Thoughts 

Whether it’s helping a customer debug a dashboard filter at 4:59pm on a Friday or wiring RFID sensors into a pool table, I’ve always believed that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing slightly — ideally with charts. And if someone tells you it can’t be done? That’s usually a good sign you’re onto something fun. 

Cheers for reading — if you ever fancy a game (or need a dashboard with a side of Yorkshire grit), you know where to find me.