Maria Castaneda: Building Mesa Group's AI Ops Dashboard in 30 Days

Maria Castaneda in conversation.

Mesa Group's COO walks through the 30-day build of her cross-location ops dashboard — what she connected, what she'd skip, and the prompt she used to make the dashboard a Monday-morning email instead of a forgotten link.

Show notes

Maria Castaneda took over as COO of 12-unit Mesa Group six months ago and shipped a cross-location ops dashboard in her first thirty days. In this episode she goes deep on the build: which data sources she connected, in what order, and why she didn’t hire an engineer.

The most interesting part of the conversation: the prompt she used to turn a dashboard into a Monday-morning briefing — the thing that made GMs actually open it.

Timestamps

  • 03:00 — Why a board mandate that says “build a dashboard” is almost always the wrong mandate
  • 09:30 — The four data sources and the order to connect them
  • 18:20 — The Hex workbench, why she chose it, and what it cost
  • 27:00 — The Monday-morning briefing prompt (read aloud)
  • 35:00 — What changed about Mesa Group’s Monday meeting after launch
  • 42:00 — What she’d do differently if she did it again

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