A Series-B SaaS we work with had 14 Looker dashboards averaging 2.1 views per week. The CEO still asked, every Monday, how the previous week had gone.
The dashboards existed. Nobody read them. They were too much, too late, and too disconnected from any decision somebody actually had to make that morning.
The replacement
- Daily 8am Slack brief — one paragraph, three bullets.
- What is up, what is down, what to do today.
- Per-role views: CEO sees revenue; sales sees pipeline; ops sees throughput.
- Anomalies surfaced with context, not buried in a chart.
Six weeks after deployment, leadership killed 11 of the 14 dashboards. Internal NPS on "do we have visibility?" jumped from 31 to 49. Time-to-decision on weekly metrics dropped 71%.
“Dashboards are graveyards. Briefings are decisions.”