The dashboard graveyard
I have built dashboards for a decade, and I have also buried a few: beautiful, complete, and unvisited. The pattern behind every dead dashboard is the same: it answered every possible question, so it answered nobody's actual question.
What survives: three numbers and coffee
The dashboards that get opened every morning have a different shape. Three numbers, big, with yesterday next to them. For an e-shop: revenue yesterday, orders in progress, ad spend against it. For a services firm: cash position, pipeline value, hours billed this week. The owner checks them with coffee, and when one looks wrong, THEN they click deeper.
Fewer numbers is not a limitation. It is the feature. A number earns its place on the morning screen only if a bad value would change what you do today. Everything else belongs one click down.
Finding your three
The exercise I run with owners takes twenty minutes: imagine you are at the airport, you have one glance at your phone before boarding. What three values tell you whether to relax or to make a call? The first two come instantly. The third is where the argument starts, and that argument is the most valuable part, because it forces the question "what do we actually steer by?"
The plumbing matters more than the charts
A dashboard is only as honest as its pipes. If the stock number comes from the file someone updates "usually on Fridays", you have built a very fast way to look at stale data. Most of my dashboard work is actually integration work: pulling the truth out of the e-shop, the accounting system and the warehouse before drawing anything. The chart library is the last and least interesting decision.
If your reporting means someone assembles a file every Monday, tell me what is in it: that file is the spec for a dashboard that builds itself every night.