Dashboards answer the questions you had last quarter. Here is what we do instead.
Every company we talked to had the same graveyard: dozens of dashboards, each built for a question someone had once, most of them unopened for months.
Dashboards freeze old questions
A dashboard is a snapshot of what someone wanted to know when it was built. Products change faster than that. The question that matters this week is rarely on any chart.
Questions are cheaper than charts
When asking is fast, people ask more, and they ask better. Teams using Northlight ask about four times as many questions as they used to open dashboards, and they stop waiting for the data team to build the next one.
What we kept
We did not throw everything away. Boards still exist, but they are made of pinned answers, not hand-built charts. When the question changes, you ask a new one and pin that instead.