10+ years. Dozens of industries. And one goal: Building dashboards that people love (and actually use...)

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I’ve seen firsthand how some dashboards become decision-making powerhouses, while others collect dust. It’s not just the data—it’s how you present it.

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Luckily there are a few key lessons I’ve learned about building dashboards that don’t just look good, but actually help teams and clients make smarter, faster decisions.

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Lesson 1: There’s Nothing Without Context

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"Sales are up 10%!"

Is that great? Terrible? Without context, it’s impossible to tell. Even with a percentage increase, we’re still missing key information.

To truly understand performance, you need a point of comparison. It can be a budget, target, industry benchmark, or historical trend.Most off-the-shelf tools make this difficult, but you need to make sure that your dashboards provide context alongside the numbers.

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Lesson 2: What Am I Supposed to Do With This?

Too many times a dashboard is built by dumping data on a screen and expecting the users to figure it out.  Without a clear purpose, even the best looking dashboards become useless.



Before building, work backward.

You should build every dashboard with these three questions in your mind:

• Who is using it?
• What decisions will they make with it?
• How can we make those decisions easier?

A good dashboard doesn’t just show data—it tells the user what to do next.

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Lesson 3: No Trust, No Dashboard.

There's an old (made-up) saying:



"It takes weeks to build a dashboard, and seconds to destroy it.”


Whoever said that is clearly very wise.

At every level in an organization, if your users lose trust in the data shown in the dashboard, or don't know how the metrics are calculated, you've lost them as a user.

In today's world of AI, there is no excuse for not having data quality checks and an up-to-date data dictionary.

Lesson 4: Not How High, But Why.

“If someone asks you to jump, don’t ask ‘how high’ - ask ‘why?’”

The role of a (good) dashboard developer isn’t to build dashboards, it’s to find the best solution.

Requests will come in (I’m looking at you, C-level...) that may not be completely thought out, or understand the tradeoffs that will come with that decision.Spending time and resources to calculate a new complex metric that only one person understands or building a real-time data infrastructure to support twice daily refreshes is a waste.

Protect your dashboard (and time).

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Lesson 5: DaaP - Dashboard as a Product

Dashboards are usually treated as a one-time project, but the best dashboards are built like a product.To build something people will actually use, you need to approach building a dashboard like developing a product.

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Applying a Product Mindset to Dashboards:

• Understand the core problem: Why does this dashboard need to exist? Who’s going to use it? What pain points does it solve?
• Know the competition: How are people solving the problem today? (Hint: it’s probably a spreadsheet). Even for an internal product, you are competing with something.
• Start with an MVP: How can you solve the problem as quickly and simply as possible?
• Onboarding is key: A user’s first experience with your dashboard will mean a lot. Think about every step of how they will learn and use it.
• Learn & iterate: A dashboard isn’t done when it’s published. Getting usage data can provide valuable insights into how its used.

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Better dashboards, better decisions.

Dashboards should do more than display data, they should drive action.But each company is different.

And most off-the-shelf tools will make it very hard, if not impossible, to get what you really need.With the right partner you can have it both ways, a custom dashboard built exactly for you while still not needing to support a whole data team.