Dashboards and reports

The second is that the dashboard answers questions nobody asked. It shows what the tool exports easily rather than what the business argues about. Sessions and impressions are simple to display and rarely change anyone's plans. Which channel is producing customers who stay is harder to compute and actually affects where next quarter's budget goes.

Both failures are avoidable, and both are cheaper to avoid at the sketch stage than after launch.

That question tends to reorganise the whole layout. A sales director who needs to know where deals are stalling wants pipeline by stage with time-in-stage attached, not a revenue total they already know from the finance report. A marketing lead comparing channels needs cost per acquisition next to retention, because the cheapest channel to acquire from is frequently the worst one to keep.

Once the decisions are clear, the visual work is largely restraint. One primary number, a few that explain it, comparison against target and against the same period last year, and a way down into the detail when the headline looks wrong.

In practice this means labelling in business language rather than column names, showing change rather than raw values where change is what matters, and choosing conventional chart types. A bar chart that everyone reads correctly beats a more elegant visualisation that half the room misinterprets. Colour carries meaning sparingly, usually only to mark whether something is above or below where it should be.

We also try to keep one screen as the entry point. Scrolling is where attention goes to die.

Custom-built dashboards are worth it in a narrower set of cases: when reporting has to sit inside your own product, when external customers will see it, or when the view needs to combine numbers with actions the user can take from the same screen. Those are real requirements, but they are less common than the desire to build something bespoke suggests.

Weekly and monthly summaries delivered by email reach people who will never open a BI tool, particularly executives and external stakeholders. They work best when they are short, contain the same handful of figures each time, and lead with what changed rather than with everything that stayed the same. Where a threshold is crossed, an alert beats a report entirely.

The measure of success is boring but real. Six months in, the numbers are quoted in meetings without anyone reopening the source system to check them.