Dashboards fail when they become a place to look rather than a place to decide. The answer is rarely more charts. It is a narrower operating question, an explicit owner, and a signal whose change triggers a next step.
Start with the decision
Before a metric earns space, name the decision it informs. That forces the team to agree on what a change in the metric should cause them to do.
A metric is only useful when its movement changes the work.
Three tests for every signal
- Can a named person act on it?
- Does its definition remain stable from one review to the next?
- Can a reader explain the consequence of a material change?
