We built the perfect dashboard. Nobody used it.
We spent three months building an executive dashboard. Real-time data. Beautiful visualizations. Every metric the leadership team requested.
Six months later, nobody used it. Executives still asked analysts to “pull the real numbers” before board meetings.
The problem wasn’t data quality. The pipeline was solid. The problem was definition quality. “Revenue” meant something different to Sales than to Finance. “Active users” included test accounts. “Churn” was calculated at a different point than what the board expected.
The dashboard showed exactly what we told it to show. We just never agreed on what we were measuring.
Trust isn’t built by accuracy. Trust is built by shared definitions. The conversation about what a metric means matters more than the engineering to calculate it.
We fixed it by running definition workshops before touching a single line of code. One owner per metric. Written definitions signed off by every stakeholder who would see the number.
The second dashboard took half the time to build. Everyone used it.
When was the last time you ran a definition workshop before building a report?