5 Essential Tips to Build Business Dashboards Stakeholders Love

A practical guide to designing clear, effective, and actionable dashboards for decision-making

Working in data science, dashboarding often feels like an unfavored but unavoidable work. Why is it unfavored? Dashboarding is less technical (less fancy) than analysis and modeling, and more repetitive. But why is it also unavoidable? It is the first and must-have step to understand any product, opening the gate to analysis and modeling. It even helps build trust with stakeholders as dashboarding is usually among the first requests from your stakeholders.

Meanwhile, the difficulty of dashboarding is also often undervalued. I have seen numerous dashboards built by colleagues in the past seven years. Surprisingly, not everyone does this ‘easy task’ well. You might be wondering, isn’t dashboarding just creating a bunch of charts? Well, Yes and No. To build a good dashboard, you need to logically organize each visualization and simplify the complex data for your audience. It is more about data-informed decision-making. Moreover, a good dashboard can always enable self-serve analytics and reduce tedious data pull requests, benefitting the data team in return.

In this article, I will share my top five tips for designing effective business dashboards that provide clarity, actionable insights, and lasting value. These tips apply to any dashboarding tools you use — no matter it is Tableau, Looker, PowerBI…