A Tableau Project Leader is a user (or group) granted administrator-like permissions for a specific project and its nested projects. Project Leaders can manage permissions, move content, create sub-projects, certify data sources, and oversee everything inside their assigned project — without needing full Site Admin rights across the entire site.
The role exists in both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud, and it is the single most useful tool for delegating content administration in any Tableau deployment with more than one team.
What is a Tableau Project Leader?
A Tableau Project Leader is a user or group assigned to manage a specific project and any nested projects beneath it, with administrator-like access scoped to that project hierarchy. Project Leaders effectively are the content administrators for the projects they oversee, handling access, permissions, content promotion, data source certification, and content maintenance.
Since Tableau 2020.1, Project Leader is implemented as a setting applied through the Actions menu, rather than a capability that can be allowed or denied like other permissions. This change made Project Leader status easier to assign and harder to misconfigure. Project Leader status is always inherited downward through the entire project hierarchy and can only be removed from the level where it was set.
The role works identically in Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud. The only real difference between the two is that Cloud handles the underlying server administration for you, so Site Admins in Cloud have a slightly narrower set of responsibilities than their Server counterparts. Project Leaders themselves do the same job in both.
What can a Tableau Project Leader do?
A Project Leader has a specific set of permissions inside their assigned project:
- Create or delete nested projects (sub-projects within the parent)
- Change the project permission level from Locked to Customizable (or vice versa)
- Add or change extract refresh schedules for content under their supervision
- Add, modify, or delete any workbook or data source in the project (including web edit and re-publish)
- Move content between projects, provided they are a Project Leader for both source and target
- Restore old revisions of workbooks and data sources
- Change workbook, data source, and flow permissions
- Change data source credentials (the username and password used to connect)
- Certify or un-certify data sources, marking them as the trusted version for the team
A user assigned as Project Leader automatically gains their maximum capabilities for that project, regardless of what their default permissions say. A Project Leader does not have to be the project owner or a server administrator.
The full scope of Project Leader permissions is only available to users with a Creator or Explorer (can publish) site role. A user with a Viewer role can still be set as a Project Leader, but with these significant limitations:
- They cannot manage permissions for other users.
- They cannot create new sub-projects.
- They cannot move content.
- They cannot add or change other Project Leaders.
In practice, assigning a Viewer as a Project Leader rarely makes sense — the role is designed for users who can actively publish and manage content. The Tableau Help documentation on Manage Permissions with Projects covers the full permission model in more detail.
Project Leader vs Content Owner vs Site Admin
Three different roles can manage Tableau content, and they're easy to confuse. Here is how they compare:
A useful mental model: the Content Owner automatically receives all Project Leader powers, but only for the specific content they published. The Content Owner can also assign or change Project Leaders for the content they own. The key practical differences are that there can only ever be one Content Owner per object (whereas any number of users can be Project Leaders), and a Project Leader can promote other users to Project Leader, while a Content Owner cannot promote another user to Content Owner.
When evaluating a user's capability to do something with a specific piece of content, the hierarchy to check is: Site Admin → Project Leader → Content Owner → individual or group permission rules.
Group sets and Project Leaders (new in Tableau 2024.2)
Since Tableau 2024.2 (June 2024), group sets are a new permission layer that can be combined with Project Leader assignments for more granular access control.
A group set is a collection of groups where users must belong to all groups in the set to receive the permissions assigned to it (an AND condition, rather than the OR behaviour of standard group permissions). This makes group sets ideal for use cases like "users who are in HR Content Creators AND Core Project Leaders should be Project Leaders for the HR project."
Group set permission rules are evaluated after user and group rules. So in practice, you would assign Project Leader status through the standard flow, and use group sets to further qualify which users in a group are actually eligible. This is especially useful for sensitive projects where simple group membership isn't enough.
The Tableau Help guide on Configure Projects, Groups, Group Sets, and Permissions covers the group set model in depth.
When should you assign a Project Leader?
The point of the Project Leader role is to delegate content administration without exposing the entire site. Common scenarios where this is the right move:
- Domain-expert business users own the data. Sales managers know the sales data, HR business partners know the HR data, finance leads know the financial data. Assigning them as Project Leaders for their respective projects means they can govern their own content without going through IT for every permission change.
- Multi-team deployments where centralised admin is a bottleneck. If your Site Admin team is fielding daily permission requests from 10 different business units, Project Leaders push that work to the people closest to it.
- Decentralised governance models. Some organisations explicitly want each team to own its own analytics governance, with the Site Admin team focusing on platform health (performance, schedules, resource management) rather than content decisions.
- Project-level data source certification. When you want a specific user to be authoritative about which data sources are the "source of truth" for their domain, Project Leader gives them the certification rights without the broader admin powers.
If you want to extend this delegation model with programmatic provisioning (assigning Project Leaders at scale or as part of an onboarding workflow), our guide on how to automate Tableau Server tasks with the REST API shows how to do this through code.
How to assign a Tableau Project Leader
The procedure is essentially identical in Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud.
Step 1: Navigate to the project's permissions
In the Explore pane, find the project you want to manage. Click the ... (More Actions) menu next to the project name, then select Permissions.
Step 2: Find the user or group in the permission rules
In the permissions dialog, locate the row for the user or group you want to set as Project Leader. If they are not already in the list, click + Add User/Group Rule to add them first.
Step 3: Open the action menu and set as Project Leader
Click the ... action menu next to that permission rule and select Set Project Leader.
If you see an option labelled Enable "Set Project Leader" instead, you'll need to click that first. This only appears for users or groups who were explicitly denied the legacy Project Leader capability before Tableau 2020.1. Once enabled, you can then assign Project Leader status normally.
Step 4: Confirm the assignment
Tableau will show a confirmation dialog explaining what Project Leader status grants. Click Set Project Leader to confirm.
The user or group is now a Project Leader for that project and every nested project beneath it. To remove the role later, return to the same menu and select Remove as Project Leader.
Note: removing a Project Leader from a parent project does not always cascade cleanly to nested projects in older Tableau versions (some 2020.2.x releases had this bug). On modern versions, removal cascades correctly.
Best practices and pitfalls
A few things to keep in mind once you start using Project Leaders at scale:
Keep the count low. One or two Project Leaders per project is the sweet spot. Three to four is acceptable for large projects with diverse content. More than that creates accountability problems and increases the risk of conflicting permission changes. For projects with many stakeholders, consider assigning a single Project Leader group (with carefully managed membership) rather than a long list of individual users.
Use Active Directory or SAML groups, not individual users. When people leave the company or change teams, individual-user Project Leader assignments become orphaned and you may not notice until something breaks. Group-based assignment means the group membership is managed at the identity-provider level and Tableau picks up the changes automatically.
Watch the mutual-removal trap. Any Project Leader can remove any other Project Leader from the same project, including the user who originally assigned them. In a team of three Project Leaders, any one of them can lock the other two out. This is one of the reasons our consulting team recommends a small, trusted group rather than ad-hoc individual assignments.
Document who has Project Leader status across which projects. This is the most under-rated piece of Tableau governance. Maintain a record (in Confluence, a shared spreadsheet, or your IT service management tool) of which users or groups are Project Leaders for which projects, and review it quarterly. This document is invaluable when troubleshooting permission issues or auditing access for compliance.
Test with viewer impersonation. Before declaring a Project Leader setup complete, log in as a regular user in the project and confirm they have the permissions you expect (and not more). Use Tableau's "View As" functionality on the user's profile to simulate their experience without needing their password.
Be careful with locked projects. A Project Leader of a Locked project can change the lock setting to Customizable, which lets all content owners override permissions. This can quietly undo a careful permission setup. If you need strict permission lockdown, keep the project Locked and limit who has Project Leader on it.
For more on the broader governance topics that surround Project Leader assignment, see our post on implementing Row Level Security, and our Tableau Server administration training which covers governance, permissions, and content management in depth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Tableau Project Leader?
A Tableau Project Leader is a user or group assigned to manage a specific project and any nested projects beneath it, with administrator-like access scoped to that project hierarchy. Project Leaders can manage permissions, move content, create sub-projects, certify data sources, and oversee content maintenance, but only within their assigned projects. The role exists in both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud and is the main mechanism for delegating content administration without granting full Site Admin rights.
What's the difference between a Project Leader and a Content Owner in Tableau?
A Content Owner is automatically created when a user publishes content, and they own that single piece of content with full administrative rights over it. A Project Leader is manually assigned to a project (or group of projects) and has those same rights over every piece of content in that project, including content they did not publish. Every piece of content has exactly one Content Owner but can have multiple Project Leaders. A Project Leader can promote other users to Project Leader; a Content Owner cannot promote another user to Content Owner.
Can a Tableau Project Leader delete a project?
A Project Leader can delete nested projects within their assigned project hierarchy. They cannot delete the top-level project they are assigned to — only the project owner or a Site Administrator can do that. Deleting a project also deletes all the workbooks, data sources, and nested projects inside it (this action cannot be undone), so move content out first if you want to preserve it.
How do you assign multiple Project Leaders to the same project?
Repeat the assignment process for each user or group you want to make a Project Leader: go to the project's Permissions, find the user or group in the rules, open the action menu, and choose Set Project Leader. There is no hard limit on the number of Project Leaders a project can have, but best practice is to keep it small (1 to 3 users or one well-managed group) to avoid accountability issues and mutual-removal risk. For projects with many stakeholders, assign a single group as Project Leader and manage membership at the identity-provider level.
