The Dashboard Nobody Uses
Why most analytics projects fail before they launch, and what to do about it.
There's a particular kind of silence that follows a dashboard demo. The executive nods politely. Someone mentions how "clean" it looks. Then everyone goes back to making decisions the same way they always have—gut instinct, loudest voice in the room, or whatever the CEO saw on their commute.
I've watched this happen dozens of times. A team spends months building something technically elegant—real-time data, beautiful visualizations, all the right metrics. Six months later, the dashboard sits unused, a monument to good intentions and misaligned assumptions.
The problem isn't technical
Most analytics projects fail for the same reason: they solve problems nobody actually has. The technical architecture is flawless. The data pipeline is robust. The visualizations are gorgeous. But somewhere along the way, someone forgot to ask a basic question: What decision will change because of this?
If you can't answer that specifically—"When this metric drops below X, we will do Y"—you don't have an analytics project. You have a data decoration project.
Start with the decision
Every successful analytics implementation I've been part of started backwards. Not "what data do we have?" but "what decisions do we need to make, and what would we need to know to make them well?"
This sounds obvious. It isn't. Organizations are remarkably bad at articulating their actual decision-making processes. Leaders will tell you they want "better visibility" or "more insights"—vague language that masks a deeper uncertainty about what they're actually trying to accomplish.
The dashboard that gets used is the one that answers a question someone was already asking.
What to do instead
Before building anything, spend time with the people who will supposedly use it. Not just the executives who requested it—the managers and analysts who will check it daily (or won't).
hbr.org
Ask them: What decisions do you make regularly? What information do you wish you had? What questions come up in your weekly meetings that nobody can answer?
Then build the simplest thing that addresses those specific needs. Not a platform. Not a comprehensive solution. A focused tool that helps real people make real decisions.
The best dashboard I ever built had three metrics on it. Three. It replaced a 40-tab Excel monster that nobody understood, and it actually got used because it answered exactly the questions that mattered.
The real work is organizational
Technical skills are table stakes. The actual challenge is navigating organizational dynamics—understanding who really makes decisions, what they're afraid of, and why they might resist better information even when they claim to want it.
Because sometimes people don't use dashboards on purpose. They prefer ambiguity. They'd rather have plausible deniability than clear accountability. A dashboard that works is a dashboard that forces choices, and not everyone is ready for that.
Your job isn't just to build something that works. It's to build something that works for this organization, with these people, at this moment. That requires understanding people as much as understanding data.
The dashboard nobody uses is usually trying to solve a political problem with technology. Don't make that mistake.