Open the analytics tab on any product older than two years. You will find between twenty and two hundred charts, most of them last looked at six months ago, none of them in any particular order. This is the natural resting state of a dashboard: a filing cabinet that has convinced itself it is a report.
There are three things a dashboard is usually being asked to do, and it is bad at all three.
One — tell me the story of the quarter
For this, write a narrative. A paragraph with three charts embedded in it will always beat fifteen charts with no paragraph. The dashboard can’t tell you which numbers matter; a person has to.
Two — wake me up when something breaks
For this, set alerts. A dashboard that nobody is watching is not watching anything. Alerts with a clear owner and a clear threshold are strictly better than a chart on a wall.
Three — let me drill into a question
For this, use a notebook or a query tool. Dashboards are not built for exploration; they are built for reassurance. The moment you have a real question, you leave the dashboard.
What’s left is a very short one-page view — maybe five numbers, each with a sparkline, each with an owner. Everything else belongs in a report, an alert, or a notebook. When I have the political capital, I delete the rest.