Yeah -- std deviation has a similar problem to the mean in that it doesn't give you a full picture unless the distribution is close to normal / gaussian.

Pretty much why summary statistics often give the IQR, which gives some idea to the skew and shape of the distribution as well.

Unfortunately, BD and marketing just want a single number to show that the value is bigger and hate anything more complicated than a barchart.

NB: Post author here.

We've been meaning to add IQR as an accessor function for these, may have to go back and do it...the frequency trails [1] stuff from Brendan Gregg also goes into some of this and it's really cool as a visualization.

[1]: https://www.brendangregg.com/FrequencyTrails/mean.html

Barchart is basically your percentiles (just more of them) so why not show it? Bars and whiskers could be more complicated for them but still the same sort of data

Barcharts across categorical data :P

That is, the first bar is "Our Number" and the second bar is "Competitor's number."

Someone clearly gets it. Variability viz and spread detracts from that clear message.