If your executive team stops opening a dashboard three weeks after launch, the dashboard is the problem — not the executives.
What the good ones have in common
- One screen. No tabs. No scrolling for the headline.
- A small number of metrics tied to decisions the leader actually makes.
- Trend before value — direction matters more than the current number.
- Annotations for context: what changed, what we did about it.
What to cut
- Every metric no one has asked about in the last quarter.
- Filters that let you produce any number you want.
- Vanity charts that look impressive and change nothing.
The test
A good executive dashboard should let a leader answer, in under a minute: are we on track, what changed, and what do we need to decide? If it can't, it's a report — not a dashboard.