How to build dashboards that don't collect dust.

👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to a  paid subscriber only article of experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber. Free tier subscribers can continue reading for limited preview of the article.

Death by 1,000 dashboards.

Every week, I see a few posts on my LinkedIn with the same sentiment about dashboards as the screenshot above. My career experience resonates with this 100%. Over time, I’ve learned that # of dashboards is inversely correlated to impact of dashboards.

For those of us in data science & analytics, we’re tired of building dashboards that end up in the grave yard. On the flip side, stakeholders are tired of being disappointed by dashboards that don’t meet their expectations.

So, below, I’m going to share the strategy you should use to make dashboards that are impactful and don’t collect dust after a week.

Note: This article will not talk about the technical components of a dashboard. It won’t cover tools, data sources, pipelines, etls, etc. If you came here for that, I’m sorry.

However, if you came here because you’re a founder or Marketer looking to create a better data driven culture in your company by creating better dashboards then keep reading.

But, first, a fun fact.

The origin of the term dashboard

The word “dashboard” was originally used to describe the wooden board attached to the front of carriages to prevent mud and rocks from being splashed (or “dashed”) onto drivers and their passengers. Now we splash a bunch of numbers on a screen and call it a dashboard. Irony.

The real goal of a dashboard