Unpopular data science opinion: no body uses dashboards
A slick dashboard in a sales demo might win the client's business. An internal meeting of stakeholders might yield the conclusion that what is really needed is a dashboard. Many dashboards. And a single dashboard to rule all the dashboards.
The analyst will go on to develop a mighty, interactive dashboard ecosystem where any query can be answered with little or no coding required. Execs can track high level metrics! PMs can answer their own questions!
One problem: nobody wants to use dashboards
One problem: nobody wants to use dashboards
The garden of dashboards becomes overgrown, a once vibrant and beautiful patch of bar and pie charts begins to wilt. Interactivity remains un-interacted with.
What to do? Another dashboard to organize the dashboards? Revamp the entire dashboard smorgasbord and start over with a clean slate for more dashboards?
The problem is that it's usually not possible to generate meaningful insight simply by looking at line charts in a dashboard, regardless of how much interactivity the analyst jams in. Even if it were, people simply don't want to spend their time clicking around on dashboards.
People don't want charts, they want hand-crafted takeaways that help provide context and clarity to decision making
A crisp takeaway culled from thoughtful analysis designed collaboratively between the analyst and the stakeholder that is delivered as a bullet point in a slide deck has 10000x more staying power than the world's most powerful interactive dashboard
U̶n̶p̶o̶p̶u̶l̶a̶r̶ *unspoken
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