How many times have you spent hours building the perfect dashboard, only for it to be used once, maybe twice?
How many times have you heard someone say, “Let’s build another dashboard. That one didn’t tell us what we needed.”
Before you know it, you have a cluttered server full of dashboards, each answering a slightly different version of the same question. Yet the real answers remain out of reach.
Does this sound familiar?
The Common Cycle of Dashboard Building
When a stakeholder asks to see KPIs for the last year, you deliver a clean, informative dashboard that you were asked to build. After the stakeholder reviews, they might ask something like, “Why are our KPIs down? Maybe we had a drop in the East region? Can we make another dashboard that shows that?”
So, you build and build again and again.
It’s a common cycle that so many data and analytics professionals run into. Everyone wants to get value from the tools they’ve invested in, and everyone knows you should be using dashboards to drive insights. But at the end of the day, even the best dashboards can’t fix a bad question. You end up chasing desired features and metrics rather than solving real pain points.
Dashboards Reflect Strategy. They Don’t Replace It.
Think of data and analytics dashboards as a mirror. If you’re asking vague or reactionary questions, you’ll get vague or reactionary results. If you’re unclear about your goals, the dashboard will reflect that confusion. You get out of a dashboard what you put in.
The truth is that the effectiveness of the dashboard is directly tied to the quality of the questions asked before it’s built.
If you want a dashboard that delivers value, not just something that is pretty to look at, you need to step back and ask the right questions.
Start Here Instead
Before opening your analytics tool, consider these three critical questions:
What specific questions are we trying to answer with this dashboard?
Are we tracking current sales by division compared to last year? Are we looking for patterns, outliers, or regional shifts? If the question isn’t specific, the dashboard won’t be either.Who is the intended audience?
Is this for sales? If so, is it for managers who care about territory performance, or associates who need their personal sales stats? Design and data choices depend on who’s looking at the numbers.
How will this dashboard drive end users’ decisions?
What will you do with the dashboard and the data it shows? If the answer is “we’ll adjust our approach based on the information it provides,” then maybe we need drill-down layers that explain the dashboards insights. Good dashboards will anticipate more questions from the insights.
Bottom Line
Don’t build another dashboard until you’re crystal clear on the questions, audience, and intended actions. If your dashboards aren’t delivering insight, the issue probably isn’t the tool—it’s the strategy behind it. Start with the right questions. The dashboards will follow.
Michelle Rieser is a Tableau-certified data and analytics consultant with more than five years of experience helping public and private sector organizations turn raw data into decisions. She specializes in dashboard development, analytics enablement, and leading training sessions to support users across all skill levels.