Why nobody looks at your dashboard (and why it's not your fault)

TL;DR

• Most dashboards are corporate theater
• Decisions are made by gut feeling and justified with data afterwards
• Real value is in ad-hoc analysis, not pretty charts
• Netflix and Google don’t decide by looking at Tableau - they use A/B testing

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I’m going to tell you something you probably already suspect but nobody confirms: most dashboards you create are useless.

Not because they’re poorly made. Not because you lack skills. But because the system is designed that way.

Corporate data theater

The BI industry has been selling the idea that “democratizing data” changes decisions. Put pretty metrics in front of managers, and they’ll magically make better decisions.

Reality: most dashboards are looked at once, maybe twice, then never opened again.

They exist so someone can say “we have data visibility” in a meeting. They’re sophisticated corporate props.

Decisions come first

Here’s the dirty secret: most business decisions are made by gut feeling, internal politics, or inertia. The dashboard is searched afterwards to justify what was already decided.

Have you ever seen a director say “I was going to do X, but the dashboard showed Y, so I changed my mind”?

Me neither.

What I have seen: “I need the dashboard to show that my decision was correct”.

”But serious companies do it right”

That’s what I used to tell myself. Until I discovered that large companies have exactly the same problems, just at a larger scale.

• They have so many dashboards that nobody knows which one is the good one
• There are three versions of the same metric calculated differently
• Entire teams dedicated to maintaining reports nobody looks at
• Weekly meetings reviewing a PowerPoint exported from the dashboard “because it’s easier”

Where the real value is

Netflix, Google, Amazon… companies that actually use data to decide don’t do it with executives staring at bar charts.

They do it with:

• Experimentation (A/B testing)
• Predictive models integrated into the product
• Decision automation

The dashboard there is a byproduct, not the engine.

Real value isn’t in the pretty dashboard. It’s in ad-hoc analysis that answers a specific question at the right moment.

But that doesn’t scale. It doesn’t sell well. And it doesn’t look as impressive in a portfolio.

What you can do

If you’re the lone analyst in a company, putting out fires, creating dashboards nobody looks at… you’re not doing anything wrong.

The problem isn’t your report. It’s the question.

Next time someone asks for a dashboard, ask:

• What specific decision will you make with this?
• What would you do differently if the number is high vs low?
• Who will look at it and how often?

If there are no clear answers, you’re building decoration.

And sometimes that’s part of the job. But at least you’ll know what you’re doing.

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Sound familiar? I’ve been the only analyst in a company that didn’t understand what to do with data. Now I do consulting for others. If you want to learn how to survive (and grow) in that role, I have a data engineering course where I share what no master’s degree teaches you.