The Dashboard Nerd Guide

Dashboards are like teeth. Strong, white teeth indicate overall health and viability of an animal. And beautiful, useful dashboards indicate the health and viability of an organisation's information systems, which these days is the health of the whole org.

And yet, most company Amplitudes are a mess of confusing, mutually contradictory and misleading dashboards. Hapless PMs shrug their shoulders and say 'But what can you do?'. What can you do!? Read on and you'll get your answer.

But let's begin here – this is more a "you" problem than a "dashboard" problem. While it is possible to have too much of a good thing, the problem with the profusion of such dashboards lies more in the culture and aesthetics of the org than with anything you can say about dashboards per se.

To keep your dashboarding clean, you have to value dashboards, and in order to value dashboards, your dashboards must be useful for which you have to, unfortunately, value them which brings us back to the start in a seemingly unsolvable ourobouros.

How to break out of this downward spiral?