Journal · November 2025
The quiet cost of too many dashboards
A new dashboard is cheaper than a decision. That is why companies drown in them, and why App Analytics starts to feel like interior decorating.
Dashboards proliferate because they look like work. A designer can ship a board in an afternoon. A written standard takes a week of arguments. When a stakeholder asks “can we see it,” the path of least resistance is another tile. Six months later, three boards disagree about activation, and the meeting spends its hour reconciling colours.
The hidden cost is not compute. It is licensed speech. In a healthy practice, a small set of charts is allowed to change the roadmap. Everything else is a scratchpad. Without that distinction, every tile becomes a potential veto. Product managers learn to pre-empt the veto by adding still more tiles that tell a friendlier story.
We ask Open Cohort students to list the boards they opened last week and to mark which ones produced a sentence they would sign. The ratio is usually grim. One team in Cardiff had nineteen “core” boards for a single consumer app. After the course they kept four, and wrote owners on them. The rest were archived with a note: not deleted in anger, retired with a date.
Manager Cachecore is not anti-visual. Figures belong in a readout the way plates belong in a book: numbered, captioned, subordinate to prose. If your organisation cannot caption a chart in one line, the chart is not ready for a Tuesday review.
The measurement desk page states the house view in shorter form. This essay exists because we kept repeating it until someone asked us to stop talking and write it down.