What steps do you take to continuously improve the relevance and usefulness of your dashboards and reporting?

Dashboard proliferation and staleness is an issue companies often deal with, including LinkedIn. Bias to action leads to multiple different dashboards being built over time, leading to:

• Inconsistent metrics, since not always the builders align with metric owners on the same source of truth or a consistent way to calculate metrics

• Staleness, with dashboards not being maintained to accurately reflect changes in the business

• Confusion, with users not knowing which dashboard or report they should refer to

To avoid these issues, I’d encourage dashboard builders to ask themselves the following questions before building a new asset:

• What is the problem I am solving for? Who is the audience, and what are the key set of metrics needed?

• Do we need a new dashboard, or can this use case be solved by augmenting an existing, well-established one? Minimizing the number of surfaces that users interact with is key

• What is the established source of truth for the data needed by the dashboard? Who owns the metrics that will be displayed in the dashboard, and how to correctly calculate them?

• Who will be responsible for maintaining the dashboard on a recurring basis?

Additionally, from time to time it is helpful to do a “clean-up”. For example, remove any dashboards that show limited use in the last 90 days. Also, try to stop sending that weekly report to see how many recipients will reach out asking about it.