The Myth of the 'Single Dashboard' That Makes Everyone Happy
Stop trying to build a Swiss Army Knife dashboard. You’re just confusing the client and exhausting your analysts. Here is how to split the view.
Stop Serving the Soup on the Floor
I sat in a Quarterly Business Review last Tuesday that was, quite frankly, tragic. A very bright young consultant pulled up a Power BI dashboard that looked like the control panel of a nuclear submarine. It had twelve tabs. It had filters for “Campaign ID,” “Ad Group Logic,” and something called “Attribution Decay Model.”
The client, a Marketing Director with three minutes to spare between board meetings, stared at it. She squinted. Finally, she pointed to a red number in the bottom corner and asked, “Does that mean we lost money?”
The consultant panicked. “No, no! That’s just the variance on the impression share for the third ad group in the beta test.”
The room went silent. The trust evaporated. It was painful to watch.
The mistake here wasn’t the data. The data was accurate. The mistake was assuming that a tool designed for a data scientist is suitable for a decision-maker. We try to be “transparent” by showing every nut and bolt, but to the client, it just looks like a pile of mechanical parts on the garage floor.
The Confusion: The “God Mode” Fallacy
There is a pervasive myth in our industry that we should build one “Master Dashboard” to rule them all. The logic goes: if we put everything in one place, we only have to maintain one asset. It sounds efficient. It is actually just lazy.
When you force a client to wade through operational metrics to find strategic insights, you are creating friction. You are asking them to do the work you were hired to do.
- Analysts need granularity. They need to know why the click-through rate dropped on Tuesday at 4:00 PM. They are the mechanics in the engine room.
- Clients need direction. They need to know if the strategy is working and if they should sign the renewal cheque. They are the passengers in the First Class cabin.
When you invite the passenger into the engine room, they don’t think, “Wow, look at all this complexity, how impressive.” They think, “Ideally, I would like to be drinking champagne, not looking at grease.”
If your dashboard requires a ten-minute “training session” to navigate, you have failed. A report is not a puzzle; it is an answer.
The Headline: The Shop Window vs. The Warehouse
The fix is not to dumb down the data. It is to curate the view. I call this the “Shop Window vs. Warehouse” approach.
Think of a high-end boutique.
- The Shop Window (The Client Report): This is clean, minimalist, and curated. It shows three mannequins, perfectly dressed. It tells a story. “This is the trend. This is what you should buy.”
- The Warehouse (The Analyst View): This is out the back. It is stacked high with boxes, SKUs, inventory lists, and dust. It is messy because it needs to be accessible for the staff to find the right size.
Your client should never see the warehouse.
[TO EDITOR: Illustration showing two screens. Screen A is “The Warehouse” - crowded, matrix tables, tiny font. Screen B is “The Shop Window” - one large KPI, one trend line, one sentence of text. Arrow points from A to B labelled “Curation”.]
We need to build a “Shop Window” dashboard. It should answer three questions, immediately, without clicking:
- Are we winning or losing?
- Why?
- What are we doing next?
If I have to click a drop-down menu to find out if we are profitable, I have already lost interest. And if you ask me to filter by date range, I am going to assume you haven’t finished the design.
By splitting the audience, you get the best of both worlds. The analysts can have their complex, interactive, filter-heavy playground to debug the campaigns. The client gets a static, clean, simple view that tells them they are safe in your hands.
Everyone is sorted. The client feels smart because they understand the chart immediately. The analyst feels smart because they have the tools to dig deep. And you save yourself the embarrassment of explaining what “Attribution Decay” means to a board of directors who just want to know if they can afford the Christmas party.
Don’t be too clever by half. Build a shop window. Keep the warehouse door shut.
FAQs
Ideally, shouldn't everyone see the same data?
They should see the same *results*, not the same *working out*. A restaurant patron wants the soup, not the recipe.
Does this mean I have to maintain two dashboards?
Technically, yes. But maintaining one dashboard that generates fifty follow-up emails is far more work. Trust me.
My client asked for 'full access' to the raw data.
That is a test. They are testing your ability to synthesise. Give them the summary first, and put the raw data in a dusty basement link they will never click.