Three months of development. EUR60K in cost. Zero daily users. The most expensive screensaver I’ve ever seen.
A client asked me to review their analytics setup. First thing I checked: dashboard adoption. The flagship executive dashboard - the one that consumed their data team for a quarter - had 3 logins in the past month. All from the team that built it.
The dashboard was technically excellent. Clean design, fast queries, proper drill-downs. But it answered questions nobody was asking.
The data team built what they thought executives needed. They never asked what questions executives were actually trying to answer. Turns out, the CFO needed three numbers every Monday morning. Not a 47-tab dashboard.
This is the adoption trap. Teams measure project completion, not product adoption. “We shipped the dashboard” becomes the win. Whether anyone uses it is someone else’s problem.
The fix is uncomfortable but simple: talk to your users before you build. Ask what decisions they’re making this week. Build for those decisions. Measure logins, not delivery dates.
When’s the last time you checked how many people actually use your team’s dashboards?