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Partner spotlight: building dashboards designed for clarity
Hannah Lee ·
A good delivery dashboard answers one question per view. The most common failure is the opposite — a board dense with every available metric that leaves the reader unsure what to do next.
One question per view
Before adding a chart, write down the question it answers and who asks it. If you cannot name the reader, the chart is decoration.
"Are we going to hit the date?" and "where is the work stuck?" are different questions with different readers, and they belong on different views.
What to leave off
Metrics that consistently generate more discussion than action:
- Raw velocity compared across teams that do different work.
- Cumulative counts with no baseline to compare against.
- Anything a reader cannot influence in the next two weeks.
Make the default view the honest one
Dashboards drift toward flattery. The view that loads by default should be the one that surfaces problems, not the one that looks best in a board deck.