18 September 2025 · Essay

Dashboards are not the story

A dashboard is a warehouse. You may be proud of the shelving. Nobody in a review wants a tour of the shelving. They want the list you are willing to carry to the door: the claim, the window, the confound, the ask.

We meet squads who have spent a year on a “single source of truth” board and still cannot say what they want from the director on Thursday. The board is doing its job. The story has not been written. Writing happens in language, which is why Narrative Metrics refuses to open Looker in week one.

There is a fear that leaving tiles behind looks unsophisticated. In UK fintech especially, sophistication is sometimes measured in the number of filters. We measure it in whether a new contractor could repeat the recommendation after hearing it once. If they cannot, the dashboard is hiding the work, not doing it.

Keep the warehouse. Hire people who know the aisles. Then practise leaving with four sentences. That is the whole method, and it is enough to fill eleven weeks because those sentences are hard.