Dashboards fail when they focus on charts over decisions. This playbook captures the ritual we used to move three product pods from ad-hoc spreadsheets to shared, high-trust dashboards.
The Ritual
- Friction Interviews – Capture the questions people ask before building visuals.
- Metric Contracts – Define owners, refresh cadence, and alert thresholds.
- Storyboarding – Build Figma wireframes with annotations, not just charts.
- Pilot & Shadowing – Sit in the meetings where the dashboard is used to observe gaps.
- Adoption Review – Measure usage, actionability, and backlog of improvements.
Toolchain Notes
- Next.js served the dashboard shell with embedded Grafana panels.
- Mode Analytics handled ad-hoc deep dives linked from each tile.
- HubSpot webhooks and Slack reminders nudged teams when metrics went stale. See related analytics projects