A dashboard is a decision, not a chart
Most dashboards fail before the first query. Start with the decision someone needs to make on Monday morning.
By Emmanuel Olowu
I have built dashboards nobody opened. They were accurate, fast and quite pretty. They just did not help anyone decide anything.
Start from the meeting
Before touching data, I ask one question: what decision will this help you make, and when? If the answer is "the Monday ops meeting, deciding which routes need more riders", the dashboard has a clear job.
Agree on definitions first
Revenue, active customer, delivered order. Every team has a slightly different meaning for each. Write the definitions down, get them signed off, then encode them once in SQL views that every chart reuses.
Fewer charts, clearer owners
A good dashboard has a handful of numbers and a named person who acts on each one. Everything else belongs in an ad-hoc report.